Pizza City Fest puts on weight
Event returns to L.A. Live with lots more vendors and an all-you-can-eat format
Steve Dolinsky was delighted with the inaugural Pizza City Fest, which he brought to L.A. in 2023. Dozens of Southern California pizzerias making every kind of pie possible over two days at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles? Let’s have another slice, please.
But just because the original recipe worked doesn’t mean it can’t be tinkered with and improved, said the James Beard Award-winning food writer and podcaster.
“We only had about five, six months to plan the whole thing last year,” Dolinsky said at a preview of Pizza City Fest, which returns to L.A. Live on Saturday and Sunday. “Now that we’ve had a whole year, we learned so much from the first year that I just feel like this year is going to be even smoother.”
What’s changed? Well, for one, there’s no limit on how much pizza you can eat this year, so start fasting now.
“It’s unlimited pizza this year,” Dolinsky said. “Unlimited sides, unlimited sweets. We’re also including all the alcohol like we did last year.”
This year, 14 new pizzerias join 26 returnees, he said.
“It’s a pretty good mix, just from my trips back and forth,” Dolinsky said of pizza-scouting missions across Southern California. “I’d think, ‘Oh, I’ve got to include Fat Lip in Corona,’ or, ‘I’ve got to include Petramale,’ which is this amazing story. He operates out of a church parking lot in Mar Vista every Friday. His full-time job is like he runs a boxing ring or something, but he does New Jersey-style pizza on Fridays.
“Pizzeria Sei in Pico-robertson does a very specific type of Japanese-influence Neapolitan pizza,” he said. “Because he’s so small he’s only going to be there for two hours in The Collab Lab, which is a two-hour window each day for pizzerias, which gives a small operation a chance to get out in front of all these people, share their creation and not feel stressed to do it for six hours.”
Truly Pizza of Dana Point, which recently won grand prize honors for its cheese pizza at the International Pizza Expo, will be there.
Pizzeria Ronan will also take a twohour slot in The Collab Lab on Sunday, but will be at Pizza City Fest on Saturday making Caesar salads, according to Caitlin and Daniel Cutler, the spouses behind the Melrose District pizzeria. They were also part of the inaugural fest in 2023.
“It was honestly so nice because everyone who was there was just so excited about pizza and stoked on it,” Caitlin Cutler said as she and her husband cooked wood-fired pizzas for the preview event. “They were so excited to try all the different varieties, and honestly, I’m impressed with those people. They had stomachs of steel.”
Added Daniel Cutler: “It was a pizza nerd fest. It was crazy. Everybody was here to just pizza out.”
Ronan’s pizzas feature “a base layer of authenticity with a costume of whimsicality,” he said. “So we have the classics like pizza margherita, but we grind up the soppressata so that every bit is kind of the same. You’re not wanting for more pepperoni, which whenever I get a pepperoni pizza, I’m like, ‘Can we triple the amount of pepperoni?’ every time.
“The other pizzas, we try to be creative and tongue-in-cheek,” Daniel Cutler said. “Like this pizza’s called Sweet Cheeks. It’s guanciale, which is the pork cheek, and it has honey on it. So it’s a double entendre.
“And then we do this other pizza called How Nduja Want It? Nduja is a Calabrian fatty sausage, kind of like chorizo is. Basically, this has a Gorgonzola sauce on the bottom, pickled celery, the Nduja, which is heavy on smoked paprika. So it ends up kind of eating like a buffalo wing.”
Michele Galifi of Farina Pizza brought samples of the Sicilian pizzas of his homeland to the preview. He recently sold his brick-and-mortar Farina restaurant in Koreatown and now operates Farina as a pop-up pizzeria, collaborating with wellknown chefs at their restaurants and serving fresh Sicilian and Neapolitan pizza on weekends at the Santa Anita racetrack.
It’s his first time at Pizza City Fest, which he was very much looking forward to experiencing.
“I think it’s just a celebration of pizza, you know,” Galifi said. “Different styles, different tastes, different looks, different flavors, shapes, forms.
“A celebration of pizza and food, and people coming together drinking, eating. I think, what’s better?”