Crunch. In a pizza crust, it’s an underused device. The teeth love to plunge into stretchy, chewy, hot-out-of-the-oven dough—don’t pretend your choppers aren’t salivating at the very suggestion of it. We love chewy. It’s fresh bread’s most distinctive glorious quality, right? Who’d want to crunch when she, he, or they can live inside a luxurious world of steaming hot dough?
As it turns out: Youngstown. That’s who. And with very good reason.
Just when you think you’ve exhausted the supply of unique, old-school regional pizzas, one comes along to knock the socks off right when the weather was suggesting we might need to put them back on.
Brier Hill, The Internet tells me, was, for much of the 20th Century, Youngstown, Ohio’s Little Italy. Like Larimer, here in Pittsburgh, time and tide, freeway expansion and the closing of Youngstown Sheet and Tube have done their thing to make the neighborhood unrecognizable as an Italian-American enclave today. [Sorry—no photos!]. But at minimum, Brier Hill’s name lives on in a distinct style of regional pizza Orbit staff had to sample, and that we did.
Youngstonians! … or is it Youngstowners? Youngstonites? Youngsters? Whatever your collective noun, give this out-of-towner a break. Trying to research Brier Hill pizza from an hour away is not ideal and with only one shot—at least, this time around—picking any single pizzeria was inevitably going to be a too-small sample size.
Sunrise Pizza in nearby Warren, Ohio gets a lot of praise for their Brier Hill, as does The Elmton Bar and a brand new spot called Brier Hill Pizza, both in Struthers. St. Anthony of Padua Church—likely the only outlet in Brier Hill—makes hundreds of pizzas every week as a fundraiser for the parish … but we wanted a place we could sit down and eat it and I’m not sure we could have gotten one anyway. There are pizzerias in suburban Austintown and downriver to Lowellville. But for the taste of Youngstown we wanted to, you know, actually eat the pie in Y-Town. So we went to the downtowningest of them all, to Avalon.
The pizza differs from its standard American half-siblings in several important ways. First, there’s that crunch to the crust. Avalon calls the crust “focaccia-like” and we’ll not argue with that description. Pittsburghers will recognize its similarity to the par-baked foundations of Ohio Valley-style pizza—think Beto’s or Police Station.
A pizza cook once told me his secret was “Don’t use too much sauce.” That philosophy goes straight out the window in the Mahoning Valley. Brier Hill pizza is poured deep—like buttercream frosting on a wedding cake deep—with thick, spicy tomato sauce. Large slices of green and red bell peppers make up the only other vegetable content.
Finally, there’s no mozzarella on a Brier Hill pizza … and you won’t miss it. You heard me. That sacrosanct contract pizza has with American tastebuds is nowhere to be found. Instead, the Brier Hill pie is finished with a fine dusting of Romano cheese. The order arrives looking like we’re 20 minutes into the first snow of the year, only to dissolve into all that rich sauce as the meal commences.
The effect? It’s freakin’ delicious! Mrs. The Orbit accurately described the experience as that of dragging your garlic bread through the remaining marinara sauce on spaghetti night. That’s 100% true, but understates the fact that a Brier Hill pizza is no accidental afterthought. It’s a carefully constructed masterwork of simplicity.
That, of course, could be said of just about any pizza. But this one upends the expectations and recalibrates the tastebuds. It also thrills us in that unique way that is only achieved by finding a completely new facet to one of our oldest and dearest friends.
Getting there: Avalon Downtown Pizzeria is at 17 W. Federal Street in Youngstown. It’ll take you a little over an hour to get there from most of Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh Orbit 