Pizza Buona

Italian appetite at the tavern pass

The pizzas leave the fire with char at the rim and a tavern cut meant for sharing. Zach Pollack, Chef at Pizza Buona in Los Angeles, works that appetite through an Italian-American register shaped by Sotto, Alimento, and Cosa Buona. Brown University came before the kitchens; the bench work came after, in rooms where Italian cuisine became less a reference point than a working language. At Sotto, he cooked as chef. At Alimento in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, he stepped into the chef-owner station. At Cosa Buona on Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, he carried the same subject into a more neighborhood-facing room: restraint without thinness, comfort without slackness, food built for the table rather than the plate alone.

That lineage matters here because Pizza Buona is not trying to turn tavern food into ceremony. Pollack’s own words set the frame: “Italian food is as much about what’s on the table as it is about what’s around it: friends, family, community.” The room asks the kitchen to cook for that use. The plate still has to hold its line, but the meal has a social job to do.

Wood fire, Italian beef, fritti

The program turns on woodfired pizza, Italian beef, and fritti, a compact set of signals for a Chicago-style Italian tavern in a Los Angeles neighborhood. The cooking is comfort-led, but not careless; a tavern pie needs enough structure to survive the cut, enough heat to mark the dough, and enough restraint that the table reaches for another piece without negotiation. Pollack’s longer work with Italian flavors shows in that sequencing. Bitter, sweet, richness, brightness, starch, herbs, vegetables, and seafood appear elsewhere in his cooking; here the same discipline is translated into a more direct format.

The beverage side stays in the same register. A curated wine program sits beside craft beer and cocktails, not above them. That matters in a tavern room, where the pass has to answer different appetites at once: a slice, a fried bite, a sandwich, a glass, a longer meal that gathers pace rather than declaring itself at the start. The method is less about novelty than about keeping the table moving.

The room keeps the pace

Dim light, exposed brick, and a bustling bar give the room its grain. This is the kind of service where the counter, the pass, and the table speak to one another; food leaves the kitchen into noise, not silence. The energy is lively, and the room uses that to its advantage. A tavern needs friction: the sound of orders, glassware, a bar carrying the early part of the night, the pass keeping its rhythm while the floor turns.

Pollack’s work has often treated eating together as practical and ceremonial at once. Pizza Buona brings that idea down to the hand. The close of the meal is not a statement; it is another square of tavern pie, another piece of fritti, another table making room for Pizza Buona.