An American pizza and unapologetic about it
Buffalo Chicken Pizza
Grilled chicken tossed in a cayenne-and-butter hot sauce over mozzarella, finished with a blue-cheese drizzle and sliced celery.
There is nothing Italian about this pizza and we are not going to invent a heritage for it. It came from a chicken wing, it arrived on pizza in the 1990s, and it has stayed because it works: the vinegar in a buffalo sauce cuts through mozzarella in a way tomato does not, and the blue cheese and celery do exactly what they do on a plate of wings.
The chicken is thigh rather than breast, grilled and then torn rather than diced. Breast meat dries out in a 600°F oven within about four minutes, and diced chicken on a pizza is uniformly dry by definition — there is no piece thick enough to stay moist.
The blue-cheese drizzle and the celery go on after the bake. Blue cheese in an oven separates into oil and grit, and hot celery is unpleasant in a way that is difficult to describe and easy to recognise.
What goes on it
The chicken
Boneless thigh, grilled, cooled, torn into rough pieces and tossed in the sauce so it goes on already coated.
The sauce
Cayenne pepper sauce mounted with butter, the ordinary way, made here. Medium heat as standard; hot on request.
The cheese
Whole-milk mozzarella, with no tomato underneath — the buffalo sauce is the sauce.
The finish
Blue-cheese dressing drizzled after the bake, and thinly sliced raw celery.
How it is made here
Chicken cooked first
Grilled and cooled before service. Raw chicken on a pizza either overcooks the pizza or undercooks the chicken; there is no bake time that does both.
Tossed, not drizzled
The chicken goes into the sauce in a bowl so every piece is coated. Sauce poured over the top just soaks the crust.
Twelve to fourteen minutes
At 600°F. The chicken is already cooked, so this is about the base and the cheese.
Finished cold
Blue cheese and celery the moment it leaves the oven, never before.
Buffalo Chicken Pizza — what it costs
- 18" pie$34
- 14" pie$27
- By the slice$5.50
Prices include every topping listed above. Extras are $3 for vegetables and $4 for meats. Prices change when our costs do; the menu here is the menu in the shop.
Before you order this
A shared flour kitchen, and what that rules out. Our kitchen handles wheat flour in open air all day, along with milk, eggs, soy, tree nuts and fish. Flour becomes airborne every time a dough ball is opened, and it settles on every surface in the room, including the peels, the oven floor, the cutting board and the wheel. We can tell you what we put on a pizza, and we will tell you honestly. We cannot tell you that anything leaving this kitchen is free of an allergen, and we will not say it. If a reaction would send you to hospital, this is not a safe kitchen for you, and we would far rather say so than take the order.
The kitchen is one room. Every pizza here is opened on the same bench, baked on the same floor and cut with the same wheel, and that is true of this one as much as any other. The pages on allergens and cross-contact and vegetarian, vegan and dietary questions set out plainly what we can and cannot tell you, including the things most shops leave you to assume.
The rest of the menu
Other things worth ordering
New York Cheese Pizza
The plain pie the whole shop is judged on: a thin, foldable base, a thin bright sauce and low-moisture mozzarella browned in patches.
From $3.75
Pepperoni Pizza
Small-diameter natural-casing pepperoni that curls into cups and chars at the rim, over the plain pie.
From $4.50
Sicilian Square Pizza
A thick square pie proofed in an oiled steel pan: an airy open crumb, a fried golden base and a crisp cheese edge.
From $4.25Asked at the counter
Buffalo Chicken Pizza — questions
How hot is it?
Medium — noticeable, not punishing. Ask for hot and we will use more cayenne sauce; ask for mild and we will cut it with butter. Both are free.
Can I have ranch instead of blue cheese?
Yes. Roughly half the orders ask for it and we have stopped having opinions about it.
Is the chicken cooked here?
Yes, grilled here every morning. It is not a pre-cooked breaded product.
Twelve to fifteen minutes, and worth the wait
Order a pie
Telephone the shop and we will tell you honestly how long the kitchen is running before you commit to anything. Collection is always quicker than delivery and the pizza is always better for it. If you are ordering for a crowd, the catering page has the trays and the notice we need.