Roberta's – the Bushwick warehouse that redrew Brooklyn's pizza map

Roberta's opened on Moore Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in January 2008, in a corner of the city that was then mostly warehouses and an auto-repair shop next door. What started as a bare-bones pizzeria with a single wood oven became, within a few years, one of the restaurants most credited with remaking the neighbourhood around it, and eventually a small group of outposts stretching from Los Angeles to Nashville. The kitchen still works from the same brief it started with: wood-fired Neapolitan-inspired pizza alongside house-cured meats, handmade pasta and seasonal vegetable dishes, cooked with produce that for years came straight from the restaurant's own rooftop garden. It holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, the guide's distinction for carefully cooked food at a moderate spend, recognition for a pizzeria that never set out to be fine dining and became essential anyway.

01The room and the setting

The address gives little away. From the street, Roberta's reads as part of an industrial block, a cinderblock structure that founders and writers alike have described as feeling almost fortified. One account of the restaurant's rise described the compound it grew into as "a sprawling compound that felt like an adult amusement park—complete with a radio station, rooftop garden, a two-Michelin-starred tasting menu, and a gift shop filled with merchandise. All within what felt like a cinder block fortress topped with barbed wire." Inside, the centrepiece has always been the oven: the founders are said to have sourced a fire-engine-red wood-burning pizza oven from a bankrupt pizzeria in Italy before bringing it back to Brooklyn to build the restaurant around it.

Behind the dining room, a working garden still does double duty. Roberta's serves pizza containing ingredients cooked from a rooftop garden, and houses a radio station in the rear of the building. That station, Heritage Radio Network, began broadcasting from two used shipping containers in the back garden of Roberta's Pizza at 261 Moore Street, set up to host interviews and discussion from America's farmers and food producers — a detail that still separates Roberta's from any pizzeria doing a good pie and nothing else.

02The founders

Roberta's was built by a small group of partners rather than a single chef with a name over the door. Carlo Mirarchi is the chef and co-founder, known for bold, seasonal cooking and wood-fired technique, working alongside co-founder Brandon Hoy, who trained at a Napa Valley butchery before moving into New York's restaurant world. The founding story, as told by people who were there, has musician and bar owner Chris Parachini and his partners deciding simply that they loved pizza enough to open a place for it, and before opening they went to Italy to apprentice with an Italian pizzaiolo rather than guess at the craft from Brooklyn.

Insider tip

MICHELIN Bib Gourmand; a moderate spend; booking and delivery through the restaurant's own site.

03The cooking

The pizzas still come out of a wood- and gas-fired oven, built on a dough made with a 15-year-old natural sourdough starter, a key component of its signature crispy crust. Beyond the pizza list, the kitchen's range has only grown: the restaurant now describes its own menu as a seasonally focused collection running from those Neapolitan-inspired pies to house-cured meats, handmade pasta, seafood and vegetable dishes, and desserts built with the same ambition as everything else on the pass.

04What to order

The pizza names are as distinctive as the toppings. The Bee Sting remains the signature pie — tomato, mozzarella, soppressata, basil, chili and honey — alongside the Famous Original, built on tomato, mozzarella, parmigiano reggiano, caciocavallo, oregano and chili, and a straightforward Margherita of tomato, mozzarella, basil and olive oil. The Speckenwolf pairs mozzarella with speck, mushrooms, red onion and oregano, while the Rosso strips things back to tomato, garlic, oregano and olive oil with no cheese at all, a vegan option on a menu otherwise built around dairy. Elsewhere, the Cheesus Christ leans into mozzarella, taleggio, parmigiano reggiano, cream and black pepper, and past seasonal menus have run to the Nightmare on Moore Street, which has taleggio, marinated radicchio, pickled shallots and habanada peppers, alongside the option to build a pie from more than twenty toppings.

05The neighbourhood

Roberta's and Bushwick grew up together. Roberta's entry into the Bushwick neighborhood back in 2008 contributed to the transformation of the semi-desolate space into a hang for all things cool up and coming. The radio station it hosts has grown alongside it: Heritage Radio Network has grown from a handful of shows in 2009 to 39 today, broadcasting food and agriculture talk from the same back garden where diners eat. The restaurant's own account of its expansion describes a West Coast arrival at Culver City's Platform complex in September 2018, a Nashville debut that began as a pop-up in 2020, and a 2024 opening in the Penn District, steps from Madison Square Garden — proof that the warehouse pizzeria model travels further than its cinderblock walls might suggest.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.