Over on East 12th St., it was Piola, the Brazilian pizza place, and now it’s Ribalta, the Italian pizza place. And it’s a pizza school, too. UrbanDaddy writes:
There are book smarts.
There are street smarts.
And then there are pizza smarts.
Today, we’re going to focus on that last one.
Also, we’re going to eat a bunch of pizza pies.
So let’s enroll at Ribalta, the only pizzeria in New York with three different types of ovens and its own university (but alas, no football team), now open.
Bottom line, this restaurant is really quite absurdly serious about pizza. The dough: imported from an Italian mill and aged 48 hours before baking (we’ll let you imagine what this does to a crust). The tomatoes: all San Marzano and all hand-crushed. The ovens: plentiful, varied and powerful.
Yes, these master pizzaiolos/fusspots felt it was necessary to install three different ovens in the place. Brick. Wood-burning. And stainless-steel convection. Reason #1: to bake your sausage-and-sage pie precisely the way God intended. Reason #2: the syllabus required it.
See, when this place is not standing in as the prototypical Friday night date spot, it’s doubling as the city’s first Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli—an esteemed pizza school that’s been around in Italy since the ’80s. So eventually you’ll be able to register here for classes, seminars and lectures on the science of the slice.
Assuming you scored high enough on the pizza SATs.