POLLARA

Listed as one of the Top 25 restaurants to visit in the Bay Area by SF Chronicle, Jan 2021.

In Rome, you can’t walk more than a few blocks without stumbling across a small shop offering rectangular trays of Pizza al Taglio, topped simply with tomato sauce and mozzarella di bufala or more extravagantly with Prosciutto di Parma and fresh tomatoes.

You use your hands to convey how big of a portion you want, and the pizzaiolo cuts the dough with scissors (al taglio means, literally, “by the cut”) and charges you by weight. This is the Roman street food that we’ve brought to Berkeley at Pollara.

The main thing that sets Pizza al Taglio apart from its pizza siblings other than the unique portioning is the dough made with more water than most.

Pollara’s dough is cold-fermented, meaning that you keep it in the fridge to rise. The chilled temps slow down the yeast without halting the enzymes that break down the gluten during fermentation, so more gluten proteins are broken down by the time the dough achieves the desired rise, yielding a less dense, more airy dough.

We ferment for 72 hours, which is a really long time in pizza years, but it’s worth it.

The high moisture in the dough helps amplify what’s called the honeycomb, referring to the web of air bubbles formed.

Thanks to a special oven, that puffed honeycomb layer in a rectangle of al taglio is anchored by a thin, crispy crust.

Toppings include different salumi like smoked pancetta, prosciutto and spicy salami, and some seasonal vegetables and cheeses, such as buffalo mozzarella and mascarpone and stracciatella.

We have 10 different seasonal pizza flavors available every day.

When you survey the glittering landscape of pizza-behind-glass at Pollara, all of the baking (roughly 15 minutes a pan) has already happened.

You can either warm your chosen pizza at home or have the pizzaiolo pop it into the front oven to finish and eat on Fourth St.

We hope you enjoy it!

FORZA ROMA!