Naughty Pie Nature’s grandma slices are transporting.
There is a very specific taste memory that lingers if you’ve eaten proper rectangular pizza in New York, whether it’s a Sicilian square, a grandma slice, focaccia pizza or something that’s a hybrid. Yes, the cheese matters and so does the bright burst of tomato flavor, but the biggest difference-maker is the olive oil that’s essentially been fried into the crust.
Di Fara legend Dom DeMarco, who passed away in 2022, probably understood this alchemy better than anyone else. Visitors at his Brooklyn institution would see him glugging an extremely generous amount of olive oil into a pan before he finished his perfect Sicilian pies.
Naughty Pie Nature, the new Los Angeles spot from chefs Bronwen Kinzler-Britton and Jose Ibarra, also understands this highly particular kind of pizza-making. In fact, Naughty Pie Nature’s grandma slices might be the closest thing to New York squares that on-the-rise pizza city LA has ever had.
“You’re frying the shit out of it,” says Kinzler-Britton, who’s thinking about upgrading to new LloydPans but is currently happily making grandma pizza in old, brand-less pans. “It’s all about the olive oil.”
Unlike the Neapolitan-style pizza Naughty Pie Nature also serves, the grandma slices feature long-fermented dough with bread flour. Kinzler-Britton and Ibarra have carefully considered all details, including the Stanislaus 7/11 tomatoes in their sauce and how they don’t want the olive oil they use for their grandma pizza to be too peppery. (This is something Naughty Pie Nature also has in common with a lot of New York pizza places, which purposefully make squares with commodity olive oil.)
“We use Grande cheese because it gives it that essential cheese pull,” Kinzler-Britton says as she elaborates on the process of creating grandma slices. “We go low-moisture Grande, sliced and shredded, and then we do a cooked tomato sauce. I just feel like that’s essential for this style. And we bake it at a high heat.”
Naughty Pie Nature also puts its own spin on Neapolitan pizza.
The result is something that’s simultaneously simple and transporting. The grandma slices (cheese or pepperoni) are available only for walk-up orders. As it turns out, these exemplary slices aren’t even what the versatile Naughty Pie Nature specializes in at its new Echo Park pizzeria.
Naughty Pie Nature, which operates a take-out counter with outdoor seating adjacent to a dispensary, primarily focuses on its playful riffs on Neapolitan pizza. There are pun-tastic bangers like the Morty McFly (lemon ricotta, mozzarella, pistachio, Calabrian chili flakes, mortadella, Parmesan, basil), Wake & Bake (mozzarella, cheddar, potato, bacon, egg, spicy green sauce, pickled shallot, cilantro) and Fun Guy (mushroom cream, mozzarella, fontina, roasted mushrooms). There’s also a habit-forming amatriciana pizza.
So much of Naughty Pie Nature is tied to fond memories.
“Neapolitan-style pizza was the first job I ever had professionally in the food industry,” Kinzler-Britton says of her stint at Brooklyn mainstay Paulie Gee’s, which kicked off a culinary career that’s included stops at Brooklyn’s Misi and LA’s Etta (where she met Ibarra). “So it’s not only a taste memory; it’s a core. It solidified my existence in the food world. And after having done all these other jobs, that’s the most fun I’ve ever had in the industry and the happiest I’ve ever been. I’ve always wanted to get back to that.”
Meanwhile, Ibarra, who’s worked at Italian restaurants like LA’s Drago Centro, says he’s always liked the lightness of Neapolitan-style pizza. But he wanted to put his own stamp on it. It took two months to figure out the right dough recipe for Naughty Pie Nature.
“This is the style I prefer, and I think it’s a perfect vessel for the kind of flavor profiles we want to use and reflect our childhood or food memories,” Ibarra says.
“It’s just all the foods we love,” says Kinzler-Britton, who is from Austin and whose Wake & Bake pizza is an ode to breakfast tacos, which are her “favorite meal on the face of the earth.”
Naughty Pie Nature has a takeout window and outdoor seating in Echo Park.
There’s also a pepperoni pizza called the O.P.P. and banana pudding for dessert because the goal is to be lighthearted in a city where the pizza landscape is still developing.
“Since it’s a new scene, people are just free to do whatever the fuck they want,” Kinzler-Britton says. “And there’s space for everybody, which is even cooler.”
Ibarra says he’s excited about “focusing on seasonality” and cooking with different produce as he settles into Naughty Pie Nature’s brick-and-mortar location after operating as a pop-up. Sometimes, he’ll get annoyed that Kinzler-Britton uses a vague recipe for meatballs. But the thing is, the meatballs always end up tasting exactly the same.
Naughty Pie Nature “is just entirely a reflection of our personalities,” Kinzler-Britton says as she and Ibarra take a break from scrubbing pans.
This restaurant has the potential to grow into all kinds of things, but it also works nicely in its current incarnation as a two-person operation.
