Today is a day where cars are banned from a contiguous street in Pittsburgh. This frees the citizens to explore streets and role-play as someone who has survived an apocalypse. An era where cars have rusted into extinction, people barter by using hoagies, and everyone sleeps in the park.
But as we take back the streets, today is a great day to enjoy some pizza. You can even enjoy the luxury of sitting in the street, cross legged, with a pizza box and a circle of friends in the middle of Penne Avenue!
Here’s some of the best places to stop along the Open Street PGH route to grab some pizza.
Located in the Strip between 19th and 20th street, this is a grand place to get a pie. It’s a classic kind of pizza that will bring back memories of long summer days and late nights running recklessly through streets as a kid.
This is a bit greasier, sloppy pizza. But if you’ve made the trek downtown to 9th street from 40th street, this could be the kind of pizza to perk you up and restore those lost nutrients.
A bit beyond the end / start of Open Streets PGH is Stone. It’s an extraordinary pizzeria that sits on the cusp of Point Park. They can whip you up an authentic Italian pizza (with the fluffy dough and buffalo mozzarella) in just a few minutes.
Have any suggestions? unfortunately many of these places don’t open until around noon. And who knows, maybe there will be other pizza surprises along the route! Enjoy your day on the streets!
Hi. Pizza is a food that can strike at any moment. During a party, during sad times and during the times of your life that you’ll remember for ages to come. To ensure you’re always near a pizza shop I’m going to do my best to educate you about the best pizza you can digest in nearly any scenario. Today, we’ll talk about pizza strategy for a Pittsburgh Pirate’s game.
Summer is approaching and with the heat, humidity and moderate amount of quality Pittsburgh sunshine comes baseball. To cheer on the Buccos you’re going to need some good pizza.
Here’s some pizza places to eat at when you go to a Pittburgh Pirate’s Game.
Giovanni’s
Giovanni’s employees a clumsy italian man who’s only job is to drop his biscotti and, when he bends over to pick it up, use his rotund rump to knock a canister of sugar into a vat of their sauce.
With that in mind, this is the kind of pizza place you go to if you have kids tagging along for a hot day at the park. The sweetness of the pizza will cut though any attitude and perk up toddlers and teens alike. Their palates won’t mind the sweetness and you’ll happily choke this down.
Eat this pizza when: The Pirates play the Atlanta Braves. It’s the pizza version of sweet tea and will really get you into the southern spirit.
Diamond Pizza in PNC Park
Image credit: Pizza Pizazz
When I was a child and my dad took me to baseball games at Three Rivers Stadium I would cry in my seat until he returned with pizza. I was a pouty kid, the kind of kid who would throw a vacuum cleaner down the steps for no reason. So, when the pizza finally arrived I’d take a sabbatical from crying from nothing and instead cry that the pizza tasted too much like wine.
My dad never gave me wine so I had no frame of reference, but it was gross enough that I would choke down half the pizza and call it quits. I think that pizza was Pizza Hut pizza.
Anyways, Diamond Pizza Place does not taste like wine. It’s a solid place to get pizza inside the ballpark.
Eat this pizza when: The Pirates play the New York Yankees. They’ll sell you a big ol’ NY slice of pizza. Then, when AJ Burnett walks a guy you can shout (in a sloppy New York accent) “Hey, I’m walking here!”
Stone Neapolitan Pizzeria
Stone pizza combines the Chipotle / Henry Ford assembly line mentality with the frugality and practicalness of an Italian grandmother who follows her heart to make a warm, gooey pizza. You pick the toppings, sauce and oil and the pizzaiolo behind the counter will fix you up a pizza faster than Marte can run the bases.
Eat this pizza when: The Pirates play the Cubs. You can eat authentic, fancy pizza and brag that the pizza was made faster than it takes to cut a single slice of their thick Chicago Pizza.
Monte Cello’s
Monte Cello’s is the pizzeria you went with your high school sweetheart after a high school football game. After your ninth refill of Pepsi, six slices of pizza and a win for the home team you were filled with the feeling invincibility and enough gas to float a hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon.
There’s a Monte Cello’s downtown that exists to pay homage to your childhood. Every slice that comes out of that oven is sprinkled with a proprietary blend of parmesan, pepper and nostalgia.
Eat this pizza when: The Pirates play the team from the hometown you moved from so you could go to CMU / work for Google.
Pizza Parma
On the other end of the Rachel Carson bridge is Pizza Parma. It’s a pizza shop that exists on an ever-changing corner, except it is untouched by time. Pizza Parma adheres to no rules but their own and they’re not rules you’ll ever be familiar with.
Their slices are large, cheesy and capable of absorbing any poisons that linger in your stomach. It is both a panacea and a hinderance to your health. Choose from the Barnyard Special, the Taco Pizza, or the BBQ Chicken pizza.
Eat this pizza when: The Pirates are playing an unimportant game and you’re mostly there to tailgate, roll into the stadium in the fourth inning and boo Ryan Braun
Special Shoutout to the Beer Market
The Beer Market, located right next to PNC Park, turns the BYOB formula on its head. They have hundreds of beers to choose from and they welcome you to bring in any food. But really, you’re going to bring pizza.
You can grab pizza from any of the places above, bring it to the Beer Market and enjoy a number of beers. Getting a seat can be a strategic undertaking, but if you’re cunning and persistent you’ll have no problem.
Now you’re prepared to eat pizza next time you go to a Pirate’s game. If you enjoyed this, go ahead and tell a bud or two! You can even sign up for my pizza newsletter to get great stuff like this delivered directly to your inbox.
How could it not? Imagine being in a room with 11 other pizza judges are sleepy pizza delivery people make their way out to Green Tree at 7am to deliver pies that were once piping hot. Their trip through the tunnels and the resulting traffic, has zapped them of much of their enthusiasm After the journey, the pizza emerged, but changed. Like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. But this metamorphosis was less beautiful, and more, well, tired. The pizza was very tired of being a pizza and it showed. But pizza wasn’t meant to travel else it would have grown wings and fly itself to the destination.
Sure it’s wheel-shaped, but that’s only for looks. I’m telling you this because that is a very important caveat when it comes to judging pizza and, one of the most challenging aspects. When you’re eating aged pizza you have to be able to assess what the pizza was like. Can your tastebuds time travel? No, but it must be able to reverse engineer the pizza to understand what it tasted like two hours ago when it birth from the oven.
A rare-skill.
But that didn’t deter us one bit. We were bubbling over with enthusiasm. The possibility of becoming one with so many pizzas at 7am was exactly what we dreamed of as kids. “Mom, I promise I’ll do all my homework if I can just not go to school and eat pizza then take naps all day.” Okay. Sure. And then pizzas started showing up.
These pizzas were nothing less than ostentatious. The majority of which were piled high with meats, cheeses, and wacky sauces. These pizzas leaned more towards meat cornucopia and stretched the definition of pizza.
Of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum was the avant garde types that left many judges scratching their head at what exactly they were looking at. Let’s just assume that many of these minimalist pizzas were ahead of their time.
The pizza makers tried to impress the judges by showing us that, yes, they could add a Jenga-style tower of meat on top of their sturdy crust. Did they think we’d be impressed by the lake of grease it left behind? Or the heaps of garlic that would have dissolved any vampire within a mile radius?
These two pizzas above didn’t win anything - which is too bad! Because in their own way they were delicious. Just not after their journey. Or at 7am. And after 16 pizzas the judges spoke and one pizza rose above the others.
This little sliver of a pizza. A humble pizza. This was chosen instead of the monstrous piles or meats or overly complex slices we were served. This wasn't decadent but one of the simplest slices of pizza a human could create. If Indiana Jones were looking for the Slice of a Carpenter, he would choose this one. And choose wisely.
The winning pizza belonged to Pizza Parma located in Shady Side on Highland Ave. It best epitomized what pizza is. A fun, simple experience, that reminds you that sometimes the most simple things in life are the best things.
