UPDATE: This place is now CLOSED
Food promo titans Eaters Drinkers and The Creative Shake put together a great pizza tasting event at Via Della Pace Pizza, a cozy East Village joint that slings some really creative and unique pizza pies. I’m generally a traditionalist when it comes to pizza, but I was sold on these puppies.
Giovanni Bartocci and Marco Ventura co-own both Via Della Pace (another nearby restaurant) and Via Della Pace Pizza (this place).
With the support of his family in Italy, Giovanni Nasti, the pizza chef at VDP Pizza, has employed creative ways to get color into the dough without using a single drop of food coloring. Essentially, he has invented colored pizza dough! As such, the thrust of this event was to showcase VDP Pizza’s multi-colored dough pies, of which we tried four (black, red, green and yellow).
For black he uses squid ink. For red: beets and red wine. For green, it’s spinach. And for yellow, the key is saffron. Pretty smart, and completely natural.
Each colored dough has it’s own set of toppings. As you can see in the pic above, the toppings and dough components compliment and highlight one another to make for great pops of flavor.
The yellow saffron dough is topped with pomegranate seeds, guacamole and asparagus. The cheese is mozzarella. Very pretty!
The green spinach dough is topped with mozzarella, tomato sauce and basil. Super simple and traditional, but for the green dough. Absolutely wonderful.
My two favorites (couldn’t choose a winner) were red and black. The red beets/wine pie is topped with gorgonzola, mozzarella, sausage, polenta and shaved black truffles. This baby was super earthy and savory. Definitely my kind of pie.
The black squid ink pie is topped with red cabbage, smoked salmon, poppy seeds, sour cream, chives, mozzarella and tomato sauce. It may sound odd, but I assure you it works in every way. The day of the event was apparently both National Pizza Day AND National Bagel & Lox Day. As such, this was a perfect mash-up of epic Jewtalian proportions. I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I highly recommend that my readers give it a try. It’s so unique and tasty!
The good people at VDP also put out some non-colored dough pies from their pizza menu. The first was the Vespasiano, which is topped with fior di latte, burrata, mixed vegetables and olives.
The second was similar to their Augusto pie: prosciutto, olives, arugula, mozzarella and shaved parmigiano. Absolutely delicious. A perfect balance of savory-sweet and salty.
This third one came out as I was about to leave for the night. It’s a shame, too, because it looks like my kind of pizza! Very traditional. Oh well. I guess that just means I will be back for more…
For dessert, which came out a few minutes before that last pizza, we had these extremely addicting “Zoccolette alla Nutella Fritte.” These are nutella-filled zeppoli-like creations: fried pizza dough with hazelnut chocolate spread inside. Pop these babies with some ice cream or gelato and prepare to grow a few belt sizes.
That about covers it. I categorize this as a type 1 pizza joint (they sell pies only – no individual slices), with a nice selection of food items aside from just the pizza. It’s a full restaurant.
VIA DELLA PACE
130 St. Marks Pl.
New York, NY 10009
