Eating At Leo: Is It Just Another Neapolitan Style Pizza Restaurant?
By Ian MacAllen on Monday, February 10th, 2025 at 4:46 pm
Neapolitan pizza came to define the nouveau Brooklyn cuisine of the 21st century. Gentrification’s steady march could be mapped along the L train, and following not far behind were dots of pizza restaurants – not the slice joints of the 20th century, but restaurants with table service (if not tablecloths).
The “neo-politan” pizza is a relatively recent phenomenon in the roughly two centuries of Neapolitan style pizza making. I know what you’re thinking. The term is grating, and I struggle with even writing it. But “Neo-politan” really does apply. We are not in Naples. The pizza is not really replicating Neapolitan pies. What’s been happening in Brooklyn over the last two decades is truly a new thing.
Neapolitan-style pies are just about everywhere these days. I’ve eaten them in places as disparate as Japan and Denmark, in Florida and in France. This last location is how I know “Neo-politan” Brooklyn pies really are their own genre – I had this pie at The Brooklyn Pizzeria, a restaurant on the corner of Rue du Pas de La mule and Boulevard Beaumar chais in the heart of Paris. Was it Italian, or Brooklyn, or French? Who can say.
If the first wave Neapolitan pizza was the 19th century product sold in Italy, and second wave Neapolitan pizza from the likes of Roberta’s, Motorino, Fornino, Paulie Gee’s, Una Pizza Napoletana, and a few others that opened in the early aughts, then I think it’s time to think of the current Neapolitan pizzerias as entering a third wave.
By 2019 when Leo opened its doors, the Neapolitan pizza market had certainly matured, but that didn’t stop Eater’s Ryan Sutton from rating it a “Buy” in his February 2020 review. Three weeks later, the city had shut down in response to COVID.
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Five years on, Leo is still cooking pies. The world is different though, and not just because of the pandemic. The second wave pizzerias have evolved. Roberta’s is an empire with multiple locations, an international division, and a line of frozen grocery store pies. Paulie Gee left his restaurant to focus on his slice shop. Motorino, Fornino, and Una Pizza Napoletana have opened and closed and opened various locations.
Meanwhile, the New York slice is coming back in a big way. It’s telling that Paulie Gee left his eponymous Neapolitan pizzeria to focus on his slice joint. Roberta’s opened their own slice shop last year and the buzziest pizzerias recently have not been “Neo-politan” style restaurants but classic 18-inch pies, with places like L’industrie, Scarr’s, Best, and Chrissy’s hogging the limelight.
Leo was undeniably buzzy from the start. Part of this trendiness was rubbing off from its older sibling, Ops, a Bushwick Neapolitan pizzeria that opened back in 2016. That cozy space took a minute before becoming the “it” spot, but eventually there were lines and wait times that were unreasonable. At least once we tried eating there, but ended up at Houdini instead because I wasn’t willing to wait 90 minutes. One reason for the lines was Ops was notoriously small, with just 45 seats. The restaurant was the result of efforts from owners Mike Fadem, Marie Tribouilloy, and Gavin Compton who between them had experience with a half dozen other eateries.
Two of the trio, Mike Fadem and Gavin Compton (of Variety Coffee), took on Leo, borrowing the buzz from Ops to hype the new restaurant. The press at the time seemed to have overlooked Joey Scalabrino, the chef responsible for the dough. Since then he’s gone on to open the wildly popular Apollo Bagels.
Leo took on the space that once been home to Lodge. Lodge was an institution of gentrifying hipster Williamsburg, filled with the tropes of the mid-2000s aesthetics: vintage mismatch; shabby chic; rustic roughed-up wood; antler chandeliers; homey 1980s-feels. The food at Lodge was fine. It was more about the scene, about eating bourgeois brunch and getting buzzed, about cool hipster shit that pretended like scenesters didn’t matter. I ate there a few times, and a few times scoffed at the wait time, and then, just like that, Lodge was, just like the dream of the 90s, gone. Rising rent and the disappearance of the aging hipster did Lodge in 2018, after 14-ish years.
The concept behind Leo when it opened was to use the main dining room as a formal restaurant and have a more casual take out pizzeria on one side. The menu too was larger than Ops with pasta and appetizers added. The kitchen was also doing all sorts of trendy things like lasagna and beans. In this respect, Leo was ahead of its time. Lasagna is something of a sleeper agent, but also weirdly trendy, like the green lasagna at Rolo’s or the spiral lasagna from Don Angie. And even beans have become a go-to item thanks to the efforts of Rancho Gordo. In this sense, Leo was either trend setting or very good at recognizing what other people were doing.
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Then the pandemic changed everything. There was probably not a worse time to open a restaurant than in December of 2019, but Leo certainly made the best of their street frontage. They built out extensive outdoor dining areas with wood decking and a roof, and the space was well used.
Havemeyer Street became a success story of outdoor dining sheds, with several blocks between Metropolitan Avenue and the BQE having restaurant after restaurant with outdoor dining. The street became filled with the jovial sound of people talking rather than the buzz of combustion engines. That’s all ended now and we’re back to parking a handful of cars where there were once hundreds of diners.
Amazingly, while the sit-down portion of Leo often had long wait times, the full menu was available at the more casual takeout counter. Sitting on the street-side deck was easy, and although you had to order inside, they still brought the food to your table. The setup was a kind of hybrid table service, which was perfect for the first time I ate there – we were pushing a stroller with a baby. We rolled up, took at seat on the outdoor deck, and the baby didn’t bother anyone.
More recently though, I was there with grownups. It was snowing outside, so even if there still was outdoor dining we probably would have been indoors. We had dinner plans for a friend’s birthday who had given us little direction for the celebration other than he wanted pizza. Three of us were to split food, so we had the opportunity to dive into several pies, with the one restriction keeping the food mostly vegetarian (or in the case of anchovies, pescatarian).
We had cocktails around the corner. Our younger selves might have had another round of liquor, but instead we split a bottle of wine. Like most of Brooklyn these days, there’s a bit of an emphasis on natural and low intervention wines. We went with a basic pinot noir.
I was the only returning customer, and so I recommended a few items to start. The non-pizza items felt surprisingly limited when it came to meat-free selections. That’s not normally a concern for me, but it just so happened I was on the lookout – kind of like you don’t really see how inaccessible the subway system is until you’re pushing a stroller.
Anyway, we started off with the Caesar salad on my recommendation. At Leo, it comes covered in shavings of parmigiana cheese (large pieces, and not quite as thick as Rolo’s). In the salad too are whole anchovy filets which pack the umami punch.
I’m loving the resurgence of Caesar salads across the Brooklyn restaurant scene, and this one is no exception. Cheese is prominent on the flavors, but not overwhelming.
The highlight of this menu are the butter beans. I’ve had them every time I’ve eaten here. The flavor is rich and creamy. There’s a bit of charred leafy green that accompanies them, and a dollop of a white sauce that I’m not going to analyze, but will compliment everything nicely.
One minor evolution of this dish has been the addition of either paprika or red chili pepper– not enough for any real heat but just a touch of flavor. The beans have great texture too, soft but not like baby food–tender.
Though it’s billed as a pizza restaurant, the pasta dishes have always been first rate. We ordered the Cacio e Pepe since it was the only vegetarian pasta on the menu, but it was rich and creamy.
If I had to guess, they are adding more to this sauce than just cheese and starchy water. There’s just too much volume to it to be a natural cacio e pepe. I’m not really complaining. I was happy to dip some pizza crust in the excessive sauce rich with garlic, parmigiana, and pepper.
One point of the service that I disliked is the pasta dish should have clearly come as a course between the salads and the pizza. If the kitchen had better spaced this out, we might have had another drink. As it was, we suddenly had a very crowded table because the pasta arrived with three pizzas.
What we did not have was the San Giuseppe pie, made with sausage. This is something of a signature dish to the restaurant, mentioned more than once in other write-ups.
I’ve had it before about a year ago when the outdoor dining area was still intact. It was a good pie, but with a vegetarian among us, we chose three others instead.
The clam pie was the one I liked the least, but this is not so much a criticism of Leo’s clam pie as much as clam pie generally. Connecticut can keep it.
The Papa Madre was topped with potatoes, dandelion greens, fontina, lemon, and oregano. Potato as a pizza topping is a creeping trend that I’ve seen more frequently in the last year or two. The potatoes on the pie were great, even though it’s a starch-on-starch violence.
The dandelion greens were a bit too bitter, and I think they knew that and were trying to cover the bitterness with too much lemon. I love citrus, I love lemon, I even like dandelion greens, but the flavors here needed a bit of adjustment.
The last pie was the NY Slice Pie, a larger,18-inch pie. My first thought when it came out was that it had the look of the old Totonno’s pie. The crust had the light char and globs of fresh mozzarella. Totonno’s is one of the earlier New York City pizzerias and had always baked pies with fresh mozzarella.
The classic New York Slice, especially from the post-war neighborhood pizzerias have a thick layer of low moisture mozzarella, aka pizza cheese. “Fresh” mozzarella, as we’ve all been trained to call it, is a much more recent ingredient to become mainstream. Low moisture mozzarella, the hefty blocks from brands like Polly-O, have a longer shelf life and overall are a less expensive ingredient. But what distinguished Totonno’s for a long time was using the fresh cheese. Sometime in the late 2000s, fresh mozzarella became a much more standard topping at neighborhood pizzerias, often with an upcharge. (What pizzeria doesn’t love a good gourmet pizza upcharge?)
The interesting thing about Leoo’s 18-inch “NY Slice Pie” is that it’s not a slice pie. It also isn’t a Neapolitan pie, or even an Neo-politan pie. It’s the third wave all the way, rejecting traditions of Naples and of twee hipster Brooklyn. The crust is light and floppy like the smaller Neapolitan pies. A true New York slice should have more structure and hold the tip of the slice horizontal when picked up.
The flavor was great, with a salty pecorino sprinkled on top. There was a lot more in common with the earliest New York pizzerias, a kind of retro throwback to early 20th century, pre-war pizza rather than a replication of the slice joint slice. It’s hard to call it a slice pie, but it was nevertheless delicious.
We wrapped up our meal with a vanilla-chocolate soft serve with a candle perched on top. Much to my friend’s chagrin, or perhaps disappointment, we insisted on singing happy birthday to him.
