Taste of the Town: Pizzeria Violetta

“It's something to me that's authentic”

by Joe Horton

Unabashed editorial disclosure: I love Pizzeria Violetta. Perhaps even more important, it’s my son’s favorite pizza from anywhere, full stop. We go all the time, and it’s a favorite going to or coming from spot for a game for all the reasons we’ll cover below. They also have super sandwiches, salads, drinks. I caught up with Jonathan, Sarah, and their daughter Violet, for whom both locations—in Prescott Market and at 4395 Piedmont—are named, in the stands at Raimondi. They are big fans; the B features in a lot of Jonathan’s wardrobe. The first question, from Sarah to her daughter, was the best.

Sarah: What's your favorite thing about Dad's pizza? 


Violet: It's good.

What's your favorite pizza?

Violet: Sweet Little Pig. [That’s brown sugar candied bacon, pepperoni, basil]

Tell us a little bit more about your story.

Jonathan: I mean, for us, it was about finding a place to be a part of community. Myself, I'd been working in resort areas and decided that it was better to be a part of a community, and that’s what we did. Prior to this, I was a corporate director of a privately owned luxury hotel company. I ran food and beverage for five different hotels, and some of them were like the best restaurant in all of Massachusetts, 
and for me, it was just a grind. I’d worked in Nantucket, Park City, Sonoma County, the city of Sonoma, Napa. 
So all over America.

Sarah: Places where people go to visit. But not families.

Jonathan: Yeah, I wanted to be in a place where I could feed people and not chase that dollar. I wanted to get back to what I like to do, which is cook and meet people.

And why pizza?

Jonathan: I've been making pizza since I was about 15, and I grew out of it, obviously, to do what I did in my career. But it's something to me that's authentic. 
It’s flat bread, which has been made for centuries, and it's sauce and cheese that we've been making for centuries. So it just made sense.

I see you at your Prescott Market location a lot. I see you at Ballers games a lot. With this idea of building community, what does having the team here do for that?

Jonathan: Oh, it's great. It brings people together. If you look around us, there's people that wouldn't be here if it wasn't for this stadium. And then there's people that we see that are here because the stadium's next door from where they grew up. And to be a part of that, where we're able to bring people into the community but also support the community that's already here, to us is priceless—supporting the community that's here, and then also bringing people in to show them the greatness of West Oakland.

I think a lot of people have a thought, “Oh, I’ll open my own restaurant,” and, “I’ll just cook my favorite thing for people,” but they may not know what that actually means or entails. What’s your average day like?

Jonathan: My days are never the same. 
I get up at the same time, I take my daughter to school at the same time, and then after that, it's dealer's choice. 
It's everything from going to the Berkeley Farmers’ Market or going to other restaurant supply stores or training a new cook or whatever—our days are ever-changing.

Sarah: I'm really proud of him, that he makes everything from scratch. Real food and real high-quality ingredients.

Lots of people love pizza but also lots of people have had pizza. So how do you come up with your new recipes and your different approaches?

Jonathan: We've done a few different things. 
One of our concepts in the past has always been to take our favorite sandwich and turn it into a pizza. We've had the Cuban, we've had the Chicago from The Bear—they had the Chicago beef. We've done everything from chili con carne with flaming hot Cheetos. For me, I wake up, I think about this flavor that I want to do, and I just kind of research it, and we do it. So right now, we’re doing a—

—I had a Bolognese, which was incredible.

Jonathan: The Bolognese is great, right? Who makes pizza Bolognese? Right? There's lasagna Bolognese. We made pizza Bolognese. 


Sarah: And that was a real sauce that he cooked for hours and hours the right way. And it tasted that way, too.

Jonathan: We just got into barbecue pork, so we smoked 90 pounds of pork butt that we marinated or dry rubbed, and now we have a pizza with smoked pork butt. We've got a Carolina barbecue sauce. We got jalapeño, nacho cheese, crackling onions on top, because that's what people want to eat. 
And that's what I want to eat. So every week I wake up and I'm like, what do I want to eat? It's not Cheerios.

You have all these new and interesting flavors for an adult like me. That's great. But my son, as I’ve said, your cheese pizza is his absolute favorite pizza of all the pizzas anywhere. What do you think brings kids to your pizza too?

Jonathan: I think that comes to kind of the core of what we're doing. We use organic flour, we use tomatoes from California, we use cheese from Wisconsin—we tried to use cheese from California, but we're not able to support as much cheese as you need in the pizza business!—so we're using real food. All of our food: our French fries are hand-pressed, our chicken cutlets are cut and breaded in house and cooked in house. Everything for us is made in house. 
No chemicals, no seed oils. And I think that it's really important for kids, and I think kids taste that. I know that my daughter does.

Violet, on cue: Like, the brain says, ooh, this tastes good!

One of the other things I appreciate about you is that it’s fast for people coming to a game.

Jonathan: That's our design. 
Our other pizzeria, same thing. It's two minutes for a slice. We are prepared for when people come to visit. 
We are there for business lunches. We know, even without the Ballers, for us the number one concern is: you are working person. I don't want you to spend too much of your day, your lunch break, because I can't make your food fast. So, if you order, you’re out in five minutes, you got your food. Same thing when you come to the game—slices, salads, chicken wings, fries, everything's paid to order, and you're out the door in five minutes.

Last thing. Do you have, as a special exclusive for us, an idea for a pizza that has not yet happened, but might happen in the future?

Jonathan: Uh, yeah, the Korean barbecue? 
The Korean barbecue pizza is on our mind. That one we’ve been gnawing on for probably two years. It sounds…to me, it sounds really crunchy. But we haven't figured that one out yet.

Joe Horton is the editor of Dispatches from Raimondi.