Enjoy Tavern-Style Pizza On The Trunk of a Car
Thin, crispy, chewy, sweet and warm bar pizza with Italian sausage. Damn.
The move this week is delicious tavern-style pizza from Timmy’s Pizza.
Many of my Chicago friends claim tavern-style pizza as the second city’s true culinary contribution, not the deep dish.
And personally, I’m with them. There’s just something more “pizza” about tavern pizza than a deep dish. Deep dish is too much of a sit-down affair, a spectacle, a confusing yet completely engrossing event. Deep dish locks you in like you’re taking hard drugs—go ahead and cancel your plans for the next 36 hours—and it just doesn’t fit my platonic ideal of pizza. I like to mingle, walk-and-talk, stand-and-eat. Hold a beer in one hand, and a wave around a piece of pizza in the other. My absolute favorite way to eat pizza—chatting on the trunk of my car while my dog sits in the back seat patiently—is just much easier to achieve with the cracker thin crust of a tavern-style pizza.
Timmy’s Pizza (follow here) is doing exceptional, thin-crust, crunchy, spicy, sweet, and savory tavern-style pizza that’s absolutely wonderful.
And you have to order it online, pay cash or Venmo, then go pick up the pizza yourself in Hollywood. It’s a throwback to pandemic times, yes, but completely worth it. Tim Stanton is timely, generous, and his pizza fuckin’ rocks.
The crust is crispy and cracker-like, but you’ll notice the undercarriage is just slightly chewy. There’s nuance and flavor in his dough. This pizza is also just juicy, dude. The sausage is excellent, and bursts with good, fatty flavor and a bit of heat. Occasionally, you’ll get a little wallop of fennel, too. The sauce is mild but sweet and bright, and I appreciate that little extra kick of oregano.
Tim also drizzles his tavern pizza with a bit of Mike’s Hot Honey, which intensifies the already warmly sweet nature of this incorrigible pie. We don’t talk enough about how good sweet pizza is. Sweet tomato sauce is often seen as low-class, but that’s only if the chef doesn’t know what they’re doing with the rest of the ingredients. Timmy’s delivers that comforting, cloying taste of a MidWest-style pie that I know many of you will enjoy, but he also provides all the necessary technique to make it stand out in the bustling, modern culinary landscape of LA.
I talked to Tim a little bit about his ingredients, sauce, and his dough. The man is committed to excellence, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him blow up soon. He uses Grande whole milk mozzarella, which is rich, soft, savory, and has excellent melting properties. He also swears by a sweet, uncooked sauce made with Stanislaus tomatoes doctored with Calabrian oregano. This is bar pizza that’s been upgraded but not finessed out of your palate. It’s still warm, comforting, and flavorful. And, however good he is at making pizzas right now, he’s getting better each week.
The move is to jump on Tim’s pizza, and soon. Remember, Secret Pizza was slinging pies from his jacked-up apartment oven just months before Bill Addison named it the best pizza in the city.
Order the tavern style pizza and you’ll get the option to select “party cut,” which you should absolutely do. Party cut pizza means that the pizza comes cut square-style; that results in some slices that have a bit more crispy edges of crust, and some that are completely devoid of crust altogether. It’s great, wait for it, to bring to a party where you’re trying to please everybody. “Please like me,” your face says when you walk into a crowded room. This pizza makes sure everybody will.
The tavern-style costs $26 bucks, which is not a lot of money considering how much this thing feeds. I find myself disagreeing with people about pizza prices often. If you want to spend $13 on a large pizza from Dominos, then go for it, hombre. But, $26 is reasonable, especially for a thing that comfortably feeds, I don’t know, 3-4 people? Sure I could easily bang out this entire pizza myself, but theres’ no fun in that, either. You gotta share this damn thing.
Timmy’s also does a bunch of NY-style pizzas like cacio e pepe, pepperoni, and cheese, but…
The move is to buy a tavern-style, party cut pizza from Timmy’s and show up to an actual party or social gathering with it. Those are your instructions. Do you know how cool it looks to be the person who shows up somewhere with a big ass box of pizza? Bringing unannounced food to a function of any kind is one of the raddest, most benevolent things a human being can do. It’s why people in commercials show up to parties with a bag of chips like, “Ummmm, did somebody say Cool Ranch Doritos???” Occasionally, I’ll arrive to Good Heroin (a comedy show) with a box of Secret Pizza, plop it down on the trunk of some stranger’s car, then share it with friends.
If nothing else, it looks cool. And listen to me: Life is all about looking cool. There is nothing more important. Timmy’s tavern-style pizza gives you that opportunity, you lame-ass.
Timmy’s Pizza
On the corner of La Brea and Fountain
Follow and order via Instagram
Wow, I did it. First post. Think I’ll celebrate by eating some slices of cheese out of my fridge. Hey, if you could do me a favor and share this with your friends, that’d be great!
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Alright, that’s it. Damn, that was actually pretty easy; I’m crushing it.