Lea: Wood Burning Oven Pizza in Ditmas Park
Yesterday we enjoyed a pleasant Saturday afternoon meal in Brooklyn, sharing a Pizza Margherita [$14] and a couple of Kelso pilsners [$6 pint] at a new Ditmas Park brick oven eatery called "Lea"—on the corner of Cortelyou and Stratford. The space is casual and modern, the wood burning oven visible from most of the room, with lots of dark wood, flowers, antique chandeliers, and ample light from the huge glass windows that wrap around this cozy well designed little restaurant. The enthusiastic and knowledgeable staff of Lea serves a hungry crowd composed [on this day] of hip, young gentrifiers and neighborhood foodies—the young and the beautiful.
Our Pizza Margherita arrived from the wood-burning oven—if Neapolitan is your thing, this is a very decent pie, made of quality ingredients with a pleasing chew to the crust, dressed with lots of torn basil and splashes of good olive oil. The pizza would have benefited from another minute in the oven to lend it more char on the crust and a bit more color on the upskirt, and perhaps a lighter hand with the olive oil.
It's a brave endeavor to open a Neapolitan pizza joint in NYC these days, with Neapolitan being the last decade's regional variation of choice for upscale incarnations of pizza. In 2004, Anthony Mangieri had set the gold standard for the NYC Neapolitan pizza scene, with his glorious pies, from his now closed Una Pizza Napoletana on East 12th Street—a mere 5 minute walk from my apartment back in my East Village days. What set Mangieri's pizzas apart from the rest, was the personality and character of his pies—they had soul! Lea certainly has the ingredients and oven to finesse their good pies into very good to excellent ones.
I'm pleased to have another good spot in the neighborhood for a pizza fix, in addition to the legendary Di Fara on Avenue J.