July 14th, 2018
Philadelphia, PA
We’re back! We took a short break to have a baby. His name is James, and he hasn’t tried pizza yet but you can bet that we are going to start training him to be a pizza aficionado as soon as he can eat solid foods. Since we’ve spent most of the last two months at home, we haven’t gotten to do many travels for pizza lately. Our days of spur-of-the-moment flights and cross-country travels may be over for the short future, but we are planning on continuing our quest to finish up the lists. All in due time.
We’ve taken James to a few pizza places, but mostly local around our home state of NJ. This past weekend, we decided to be a bit more adventurous and we bought tickets to the Pizzadelphia Pizza Festival down at the Navy Yard.
We had a great time at the event. There were about 15 local pizzerias that had set up pizza ovens and tents around the yard and served out unlimited samples of their pizza. We didn’t get a chance to try all of them because the lines for some of the tents were very long and it ended up being a very hot day. Here are some of the ones that we got to try:
It may be because this was the first tent that we tried, and we were hungry, but this was our favorite of the day. Nomad has several locations, including a few in NJ, and it has been on our list to try for a while now. They offered two slices: a plain margherita and a white slice with arugula and prosciutto.
We loved this one most for the crust, which was so perfectly airy and soft. But the toppings were pretty good too, and the sauce was nice and sweet.
Pizzeria Vetri has been on the 101 Best Pizzas list, so we’ve been there before. However, it was one of the very first restaurants that we tried back in 2015!
Vetri was making long pizzas and cutting them into little squares, almost like miniature Roman-style pies but with a Neapolitan crust. We grabbed a couple of small margherita squares, which the server topped with a piece of fresh basil as he handed it to us. That was a nice touch, and we went back for seconds before we left. Our second favorite of the day.
We’ve been to Tacconelli’s too – it has many hard-core fans around the Philadelphia area. It was on the 101 Best Pizza list back in 2015, but then disappeared off the list. I just realized that I haven’t posted about that yet. At the restaurant, you have to reserve your dough ahead of time. We were glad to not have to worry about that here.
They also had a “spin the wheel” game while you waited for your slices out of the oven. Eric won a free T-shirt but because they only had size small, he gave it to me. So nice of him.
This one was a surprise. We hadn’t heard of Urban Village Brewing Company before this festival. It isn’t unusual for breweries to also make pizza (see here). We were really surprised by how good these pizzas were. The crust on these was nice and chewy, and the pesto topping was delicious. It was also one of the few that we tried that had pepperoni on top.
We’d check out this restaurant again. It seems to have a great laid-back atmosphere and would be a great spot to enjoy freshly made pizzas with freshly brewed beer.
This was another restaurant that we had never heard of before Pizzadelphiafest. This is probably because it is actually an Italian restaurant, although we really enjoyed their pizzas.
They were serving a few different pizzas at the same time from their tent. We grabbed a couple of slices of the margherita, which was also topped with a few chunks of fresh tomato. Eric’s dad grabbed a few slices of the buffalo chicken, which he raved about.
We’ve also been to Pizza Brain before. It made the list in 2016. They had a different strategy for dishing out their pizzas. They made very large pies in their oven and then cut them into little squares. The only down side to this was that not every piece got a bit of crust.
They were serving three pies and we got to try two of them. I tried the arugula, beet, honey, and goat cheese pizza, which I’d go back for again. Eric tried the cheesesteak pizza. They also had a buffalo chicken pizza, which I didn’t get a shot of.
We thought that the tomato pie from Bella Maria’s was great. We weren’t expecting much when we stopped at this tent but the tomatoes were so flavorful. We were pleasantly surprised!
Bella Maria’s is located in Bensalem, and we’d recommend stopping there for a tomato pie if you can (we are planning on it in the future!).
This was the last pizza slice that we tried on our way out. It was a good margherita slice, and we liked the char on the crust. We also liked that the tomato sauce was a bit chunky on this and that they had plenty of fresh basil.
Zavino isn’t just a Neapolitan pizzeria. It looks like it has a great variety of other entrees and appetizers. Another restaurant that we have now added to our list to visit in Philadelphia in the future.
This place was actually a pizza truck. It served wood-fired pizza, which was a nice break from all of the Neapolitan slices being served. We really liked the sauce:cheese ratio on these pies.
They were also serving a few different styles of pizza, but we went with the plain cheese pizza because it was fresh out of the oven.
Thanks to our friend Lori Freed who told us about this great event! It was really well-organized and we will definitely come back if they do it again next year. Even though there were lines to get most of the slices, they moved really quickly and no one ran out of pizza. Our one complaint would be that it took a long time to get into the event because they had security and ID checks, as well as ticket checks. James had a great time also, sleeping in the Baby Bjorn.
