PYT Bringing Their Burgers to the Bowery; Philadelphia Can Keep its Best Pizza

PYT, Philly’s Piazza burger joint famous for bacon-shelled tacos and fried lasagna burger buns, is opening this summer on the Bowery. Owner Tommy Up tells Eater they’re taking over the former Forcella & Espolita space, and just like at their Philly location, there will be a speakeasy in the back — a pizzeria named SRO.

It can’t be as bad as Philadelphia’s Pizzeria Beddia, which Bon Appetit mistakenly named the Best Pizza in America. It’s really not. The cash-only, no phone, standing-room-only pie shop in Fishtown is an exercise in pretension. Whereas its most frequent comparison, Brooklyn’s Di Fara, is an old-school pizza joint that won’t change the way it’s always done things, Beddia takes the worst parts of the Di Fara dynamic — an obscure location made to seem worth the trip, a purposefully uncomfortable waiting time and space, and a garnish of olive oil poured from a watering can — and turns it into self-satisfying performance art, and one more example of Philly trying to ape what makes New York great.

Watch Bon Appetit‘s documentary about Pizzeria Beddia below.

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