• Michael Gebert
  • Potato, leek, and bacon pizza at Parlor Pizza Bar

I was talking to Jim Graziano, of the wonderful J.P. Graziano Italian grocery on Randolph Street, about the changes in the old wholesalers’ district turned hot restaurant row, and he made the observation that there’s kind of nothing to do there besides have a really fancy meal. (His own solution is to eventually have a little gelato window on his business for people walking around.) I’ve thought about that too: when people get on the waiting list for, say, breakfast at Little Goat, where do they go to kill 45 minutes in that area?

A former auto-body shop and its parking lot have been converted into a new building that looks old, containing a sports bar and patio with dozens of flatscreen TVs and, it seems at first glance, nearly as many glowing concrete wood-burning pizza ovens. One is dedicated entirely to carry out by the front entrance; two more stand against the back wall of the main room and, next spring or so, a fourth will inaugurate the rooftop patio. Next to them stands an Italian dough mixer which mimics the movements of a human kneading dough; you expect it to have white-gloved hands, like a device in a Disney cartoon. And it has an army of mostly Mexican pizza makers, all of whom looked slightly confused the night before opening, and all of whom will look like experts two weeks from now.

  • Michael Gebert
  • “I never drink . . . wine.”

Upstairs there are two restaurants, each run, it turns out, by one of two brothers who came over from the London Soho House. Chicken Shop has sort of Latin-spiced rotisserie chicken and southernish sides, while Pizza East (the name comes from London—you don’t have to puzzle out what it’s east of) does what was described as being sort of like Neapolitan pizza, although at various points I also heard that it was supposed to be a “German sourdough” recipe, but that the brothers thought the Italian-style flour they got here was actually better than the German flour they use in London, and that it was, somehow, a “ciabatta” crust.