A new pizza restaurant is spinning their dough in Park Slope!
Crosta, located at Sixth Avenue and 12th Street, opened last week offering gourmet pizzas, along with gelato, sandwiches, and other shareable plates — filling what Executive Chef Andres Rodas and co-owner Andres Whang say was a hole in the neighborhood’s grub options.
“We wanted to make pizza and gelato for a long, long time,” said Rodas, who also owns Piccoli Trattoria in Park Slope and Bella Osteria in Clinton Hill with Whang. “We think gelato and pizza are a perfect combination.”
The pizzas offered at Crosta (the Italian word for crust) are made with slow rising dough, which takes approximately 72 hours to prepare, and includes sourdough.
The result of their meticulous practice is a pie that closely resembles the Neapolitan style, but has a longer lifespan and more crunch according to Rodas.
“With Neapolitan pizza it’s great when you eat it right away from the oven, but after an hour or later it becomes really chewy,” he said. “It’s a Neapolitan style pizza, but I don’t want to call it a Neapolitan because I want a little more crunch on the outside.”
The menu features 13 different types of pies including a margarita pie made with buffalo mozzarella, a pie with pork belly as a topping, and the “Mare e Monti” pie featuring shrimp and sausage.
Also on the menu is Panuozzo, a type of sandwich made with pizza crust that is briefly baked a second time upon being ordered. Rodas said he preferred the sandwich style to a baguette because the thin crust lets the contents of the sandwich shine, rather than smothering it in bread. Among the styles of Panuozzo offered is a porchetta sandwich featuring porchetta that is slow cooked for four hours.
Rodas is visibly excited when talking about the restaurant’s gelato menu, made up of inventive flavors he describes as ‘grown up flavors’ like pistachio with ricotta and vanilla with freshly ground pepper and cherries.
“I know the pizza is the star, but I think the gelato is the second one,” Rodas said. “People were raving about the gelato.”
Crosta, 486 6th Avenue near Twelfth Street in Park Slope, open Wednesday through Monday 4:30 pm — 10 pm, 929-295-0008; www.crostany.com.
