New Haven-style pizza hits North Hollywood with clam pies and pop punk
- Some of L.A.’s best pizza opened its first bricks-and-mortar last week, with new items to come.
- Ozzy’s Apizza owner Chris Wallace pays tribute to New Haven greats like Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, Sally’s Apizza and more.
- How Wallace re-creates a classic New Haven char without a charcoal oven.
The dough is barely blistered, the bubbles just-singed. The pizzas crunch with each bite, especially the chewy-interiored crust. There’s pop-punk blaring out of the speakers, there’s clam on the pizzas, and there may or may not be cheese, which can mean only one thing: Ozzy’s Apizza — pronounced “abeetz” — finally opened its first stand-alone location after years of pop-ups.
It offers the only true bricks-and-mortar restaurant in Los Angeles dedicated to New Haven-style pizza. But to build it, founder Chris Wallace had to journey through sobriety, nostalgia and red tape, and forgo a signature of the style: charcoal ovens, which are illegal in restaurants throughout the city.
“I was always wondering why New Haven pizza was never out here: Everyone’s so set on coal,” he said. “But here’s the secret: Not every New Haven pizzeria uses coal. Zuppardi’s, which is one of my favorites, uses Bakers Pride gas deck ovens. They’ve never used a coal oven a day in their life. So I was like, ‘OK, so if they can do it, why can’t I?’”
Wallace cold-ferments his dough 72 hours and uses a gas brick oven, where the key is an open flame: It allows Ozzy’s to churn out pizzas with the requisite New Haven-style char, with a crunchy but still-chewy crust that stops just shy of burnt.
Straddling the line of charred and barely burnt requires all your senses, according to Wallace, but chief among them is smell. After enough time making enough New Haven-style pizza, it’s all muscle memory; on a tour of the famous Frank Pepe Pizzeria Neapolitana two years ago, the Pepe family told Wallace, “We just know. We feel it.”
The new Ozzy’s Apizza — overlooked by a mural of its namesake, Wallace’s chihuahua-and-terrier mix — serves pepperoni and cheese and sausage pies, plus salad and cheesy garlic bread and Italian ice, but the two pizzas Wallace is most proud of are the truest to the style.
It’s a golden era for pizza in Los Angeles. Critic Bill Addison names his favorites across New York, Chicago, Detroit, Neapolitan and hybrid-style pies.
The Liotta tomato pie pays homage to late actor Ray Liotta and the famous cheese-less pizza by Frank Pepe’s: At Ozzy’s a thick, oregano-heavy smear of crushed California-grown Stanislaus tomato sauce is the star, with so much ladled on that the outer layer of the sauce almost tastes roasted. Ozzy’s other quintessential New Haven-style pie is the You’re Welcome, a clam pizza cooked with bivalve juice spooned onto the dough, ensuring the Rhode Island clams retain moisture and sea-like flavor along with olive oil, garlic and oregano.
“I’ve been dying to just come here,” first-time Ozzy’s customer Zak Tarkhan said on a visit Sunday night. “Nothing’s gonna beat New Haven, Connecticut, style. Nothing’s gonna beat that char. It’s got its own unique flavor.”
Tarkhan, a New Haven native, said he’s found one other spot — Urbn Pizza, with locations in San Diego and a weekly Smorgasburg L.A. pop-up — serving solid New Haven-style pizza. Thankfully, he said, Ozzy’s is more convenient and the real deal.
“Oh it’s so f— good,” Tarkhan said after his first bite. “I could eat all of this right now.”
Wallace grew up at the town line between East Haven and New Haven, with easy access to “great pizza on every corner.” The Ozzy’s founder lost his mom when he was 19, and as he’s endeavored in his business he’s questioned why he launched a pizzeria. The answer isn’t simply bringing Connecticut-style pizza to L.A. It’s revisiting his childhood, like family nights at Aniello’s or the pop-punk of his adolescence. But he didn’t always know he wanted to open a pizzeria.
Wallace moved to California a decade ago, and needed a day job while pursuing stand-up comedy.
“What’s funny is I thought that was my dream, but this ended up being my dream,” he said.
He googled “pizza” and found an outpost of Mod Pizza in Irvine, later transferring to a new location in North Hollywood — which would someday become the home of his own future restaurant. He hosted open-mic nights on the patio to combine his two loves. When the job ended and COVID hit, he began his dive into sobriety and quickly realized he’d need a hobby during lockdown. Wallace turned to pizza once again, this time focusing on developing his own recipes.
He modified his home oven, adding heavy baking steels to replicate a professional deck oven. He’d heat it to 550 degrees and rotate the pies across two shelves as they baked, ensuring that New Haven char on each crust.
Dinner parties with neighbors turned into small-batch pop-ups, with the new pizzaiolo removing his smoke detector and opening all the windows. He sold out of 20 pies each weekend, with Ozzy licking up the crumbs from the floor and greeting guests as they picked up orders.
When someone called the health department he began popping up at local bars and brought on his friend Craig Taylor as a business partner. They’d make the dough and sauce and toppings in Wallace’s apartment and load it into the trunk of his Dodge Challenger, transporting it to local patios and cooking out of a small, portable pizza oven until 2022, when a friend who ran now-shuttered sports bar Underdogs offered use of the kitchen: Ozzy’s first semi-permanent home.
“I hadn’t had any fun in sobriety yet because I was still learning about myself,” Wallace said. “That was the most fun, and still is: I just got to be myself and listen to music in the back and get dirty.”
He began meeting and leaning on the L.A. pizza community for tips, finding friendship and guidance from the teams behind Danny Boy, Hot Tongue, Gorilla Pies and more. When Underdogs changed hands, ownership offered Wallace and Taylor another space: their Glen Arden Club in Glendale, where Ozzy’s has run since summer 2023 and will until Oct. 31.
While there a January review from Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy blew up Ozzy’s spot. The media mogul with a pizza-review column rated Ozzy’s at an 8.1 out of 10, then later called it “great” and increased it to “an 8.3, 8.4.”
“Overnight, we went from a pop-up on a patio to getting named best pizza in L.A. by Dave and then every influencer in L.A. shows up,” Wallace said. “I had to scale my business from six people to 20, we had to get a bigger mixer.”
They had an opportunity to launch an outpost in New Haven and took it, but what Wallace and Taylor really needed was their own restaurant space in L.A. Early this year, they found it.
When the duo took over the 2,100-square-foot former Mod Pizza they added the large mural of Ozzy chowing down on pepperoni pizza. They had “charred not burnt” painted onto a wall. They envision a return of open-mic nights as well as building a place for local musicians and artists.
“What I want to do is make this the home that I never had when I was going through all my stuff,” Wallace said. “I can make this a community thing.”
There could be beer and wine added, or even grab-and-go sandwiches, given the proximity to the Metro station. And of course there will be more pizza — charred, not burnt.
Ozzy’s Apizza is located at 5300 Lankershim Blvd., Suite 103, in North Hollywood and is open Tuesday to Sunday from noon to 10 p.m.
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