Pitfire Pizza Opens in West Hollywood

Pitfire Pizza recently opened its West Hollywood outpost a block away from Fairfax and Melrose. Despite having a great meat shop (*cough* Lindy and Grundy), there wasn't much by way of restaurants in that immediate area. I had only been to the downtown and Westwood locations and the WeHo space is definitely much bigger, with a bar (with various craft beers on tap) and a patio dining area - and a pink Foosball table! Oh yeah.

Pitfire Pizza is very proud of their interior design: the Barbara Bestor-designed Culver City location won an AIA design award last year. This time they brought in Ana Henton and they particularly loved the way the elevated kitchen worked out. This location was actually two separate spaces and they worked out one of the elevated one into the whole design. You can easily see the kitchen staff working this way.

The food menu is the same as the other locations.
On a chilly night, start with some hand-crafted chicken meatballs ($6)

One of our favorite dishes was actually the Farmers Market Roasted Vegetables ($9.95). The winter platter featured roasted sunchokes, brussel sprouts, braised chickpeas with chard and harissa, roasted rainbow carrots with chili honey and rosemary

Possible the sweetest carrots I've had in a while, sunchokes that almost seem like potatoes, and great brussel sprouts.



The Tuscan Bean soup didn't fare so well, partly because it got cold quite fast out in the patio.

To satisfy everyone's taste preferences, we ordered the Field Mushrooms Pizza (crimini, oyster, and roasted shiitake mushrooms, fontina, creme fraiche, flat leaf parsley) $9.95

Always a crowd pleaser with the earthy and strong flavors of mushrooms and fontina.

Pitfire also has quite a few beers on tap and bottled. It was hard to choose so the owner ended up sending out a flight including an Avery White Ale, Allagash Curieux, and The Bruery's Orchard White.

Desserts at Pitfire mostly involve jumbo cookies and organic vanilla soft serve ice cream from Straus Family Creamery in Marin County ($3) with Guittard de Oro Chocolate Sauce, caramel sauce, or olive oil and sea salt (add $1 for each topping). We all liked the caramel sauce although being a chocolate lover I still preferred the chocolate sauce.

There's also a "smothered cookie" on the menu. I'm not sure what that involves but I think I'm ordering that next time!

Apparently with the opening of this Pitfire Pizza, my friends seem mostly excited about the option of picking up pizza from here and bringing it to Surly Goat four blocks down (which allows customers to bring in their own food). Good to know!

Pitfire Pizza
801 N. Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90046
(323)544-6240
http://www.pitfirepizza.com/