Pizza Baby: Charlotte’s gourmet neighborhood pizza joint
September 28, 2024
Dough biz: Pizza Baby is a gourmet take on the neighborhood pizza joint.
by Cathy Martin | photographs by Justin Driscoll
Since Trey Wilson opened Flour Shop in 2018, the restaurant has been a neighborhood mainstay, known for pastas and other handcrafted plates in a tucked-away spot behind Park Road Shopping Center. But while you might find ravioli, rigatoni and risotto here, there’s one Italian-inspired food missing from the menu — pizza.
That was true until 2020, when the dining room temporarily closed in the pandemic, and the restaurant sold sourdough pizzas to-go.
Fortunately, Wilson was prepared. Just before Covid, he traveled to Europe and took a course on bread fermentation with a French baker.
“Honestly, I didn’t like baking,” says Wilson, who also owned and operated Customshop in Elizabeth from 2007 until 2022. “Then all of a sudden, I liked baking,” he says. “And then I just really fell in love with it.”
His customers liked it, too. “It caught on,” Wilson says, and the idea for a new concept, Pizza Baby, was born.
While Wilson was busy making and selling to-go pizzas, Steven DeFalco was preparing to relocate to Charlotte at the urging of a family member who lived here. “My wife and I were looking for a change,” says DeFalco, who ran a bakery in Miami. “I thought I would come to Charlotte and get a job at a bakery,” he says, but once he got here, he realized there weren’t a lot of artisan bread shops in town.
Cocktails, left, and an Americana-style pizza at Pizza Baby East, upper right. Pizza Baby co-founder Trey Wilson, lower right.
A chance encounter with Trey, who happened to be wearing a Flour Shop T-shirt, led to a conversation about bread, and the two bonded over their passion for baking.
They formed Art & Commerce Food Group, refined their pizza-making process and launched Pizza Baby, which currently has two locations, one in Elizabeth and one in Wesley Heights.
To be clear, Pizza Baby is a brand, but it’s not intended to be a chain. Each location has a slightly different menu, and that’s intentional.
“It would probably be wiser, more profitable and easier [to keep the menus the same] but we want to speak to the individual neighborhoods,” DeFalco says.
At Pizza Baby East, the concept is a Roman café — an all-in-one bakery-café-pizzeria with espresso drinks; wine and cocktails; salads; sandwiches on homemade brioche, sourdough and focaccia; and of course, pizza. The emphasis here is Roman-style pizza — individual slices on thick focaccia — and 12-inch “Americana” pies with offerings ranging from a simple House Pie (tomato, mozzarella, Parmesan) to the Tartufo (truffle cream, roasted mushrooms, pine nuts, shaved truffles). The intimate space — which happens to be right next door to Customshop — seats just 25 with a few sidewalk tables for al fresco dining.
In Wesley Heights, Pizza Baby West is bigger and airer, housed in an adaptive-reuse warehouse with an open dining room, small bar and a patio. The menu here has both 12- and 18-inch Americana pies, like the slightly sweet and savory Rosemary (pistachio pesto, red onion, hot honey, pecorino), sandwiches and lots of shareables such as roasted Brussels, beets with goat cheese and orange zest, and stuffed mushrooms. Pro tip: Get the dipping trio — pesto, roasted pepper sauce, and French ranch — along with your Americana-style pizza. Otherwise you’ll be left with a pile of “bones,” and you won’t want to waste a single bite of the delicious chewy crust, made with just a few simple but premium ingredients — unbleached flour, carbon-filtered water and sea salt.
Wilson’s restaurants have always eschewed gimmicks and labels, instead favoring simple, scratch-made fare composed with high-quality elements. For example, Flour Shop sells plenty of pasta, but it’s not an “Italian” restaurant.
Meanwhile Pizza Baby, still in its infancy, is still evolving. While the “same brand-different menu” concept might seem confusing to some, what’s consistent is the commitment to quality, chef-crafted fare centered around bread and baking. Pizza critics are taking note. In June, Pizza Baby was named to 50 Top Pizza’s list of top-ranked U.S. pizzerias. The international online guide ranks pizzerias based on anonymous visits.
“I think the whole thing that we’re doing is a pizza built on the ethos and sensibilities of bread-baking,” DeFalco says. “That’s where we really came together — our shared love of bread and bread-making.”
And the duo hopes to bring that passion for bread (and pizza) into more Charlotte neighborhoods. At press time, the group was actively looking to add a third Pizza Baby, according to DeFalco. “We want to be accessible to different neighborhoods in Charlotte.”
And Charlotte neighborhoods would benefit from a few more Pizza Babys. SP
