Pizzeria Beddia in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood is the larger, second iteration of pizzaiolo and author Joe Beddia’s original pizza shop. The first location opened in 2013, was named the best pizza in America by Bon Appétit in 2015, and closed in 2018. In March 2019, Beddia opened a larger restaurant with Defined Hospitality in an airy warehouse space. The restaurant is known for natural wines, simple but perfectly executed appetizers, and large, classic American pies finished with snowfalls of aged Pennsylvania cheese where one might expect Parmigiano-Reggiano. The finishing cheeses include Galen’s Reserve, a Gouda-style cheese.
The menu is tight and straightforward, with five pizzas made with organic flour: tomato with anchovy, greens with Calabrian cream, an arrabbiata, delicata squash with lemon ricotta cream and roasted red onion, and its gold standard of a cheese pie, to which diners can add toppings like sausage and cremini mushrooms. Finish with one of Pizzeria Beddia’s similarly straightforward amari and, perhaps, a swirl of locally made soft serve.
“There were growing pains. It was exciting to design and create a new space. The first place was just pizza. Now we have a full wine program and small plates and salads, and tomato pie,” says Beddia. The tomato pie has since become a signature. “We didn’t have tomato pie in the original location,” he says. “It’s basically our same dough, fermented a bit differently. Over time we figured it out that now we sauce it twice.”
The restaurant also features the Hoagie Room, a two-hour, multicourse, hoagie-focused dining experience helmed by hoagie maestro John Walker. With housemade hoagie rolls and Pizzeria Beddia’s much-lauded pizzas and tomato pie, one could say that the restaurant is Fishtown’s dough headquarters.
You’ll find Beddia taking meetings and touching tables most days, and sometimes jumping into the kitchen to help make dough balls, but he’s moved far beyond making every pizza himself. “I no longer put specials on the menu anymore. Now we have a sous chef that came up with our two latest pizzas,” he says. “You want people to have that creativity and take ownership and his pizzas have been great.”
Pizzeria Beddia has also earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand.
