Maybe you’ve seen them floating around near Broadway: purple-pink takeout boxes shaped like stretched gold bars, the hands that hold them quivering with a touch of the hunger shakes. If you’ve wondered where they’re coming from, now you know: Bobbi’s, the newish, “Detroit-ish”-style pizza place next to Campus Customs.
Like its boxes, Bobbi’s pizzas don’t look like the others. Two-dimensionally, they’re sized and shaped like a standard sheet of paper. Three-dimensionally, they’re closer to a ream, plenty thick to assuage those shakes.
But before we get to the pizza, let’s talk about the warmup, tasted amid the psychedelic cartoon world that graces Bobbi’s walls: the House Salad (normally $9, though my Chaser made it free). Featuring spotless baby spinach (standing in, it seems, for the usual baby kale), roasted and chilled sweet potato, slender slices of ripe green apple, a sprinkle of raw sunflower seeds and an apple cider vinaigrette blended to a creamy jiggle, the portion felt generous, especially the spinach, and was served in tidy layers with the dressing on the side. Next time, though, I’ll ask the kitchen to toss it up, as my favorite bites came after I did it myself—fresh, crunchy, fruity, earthy, nutty, tangy, uplifting.
Next up was my BYOP (build-your-own pizza): red sauce, vegan cheese, mushroom confit (on the menu as simple “mushroom”) and red onion ($21). The crust was a paradox, or rather a few: thick but airy, fatty but light, crispy outside and fluffy inside, their powers combined for a many-splendored chew. Shyly peeking out from under the stretchy, salty blanket of cheese, the sauce was nevertheless assertive to taste, its oregano herbaceousness in beautiful balance with the sweet, tangy tomato base. The caramelized mushrooms touched with scorched rosemary lent pops of juicy, smoky, savory chew, while the strands of onion, baked to the point of beginning to shrivel, offered bright acid sweetness flavored further with moments of char. The sum was just as good as the parts, making it a tough act to follow.
But not an impossible one. Last up was one of the menu’s permanent pizzas, albeit temporarily altered for me: the Becca, with vegan cheese subbed in and ricotta subbed out ($22). My fear that the changes might leave this white pizza lacking was itself lacking, because the result was totally delicious. Zesty, layered za’atar, concentrated garlic butter (like apple butter, not butter butter) and salted, greenly funky broccoli—the florets browned to a delicate crisp where they had gotten the full brunt of the broil—combined with the crust and the cheese for a punchy, addictive bite from first to last.
The first pie was deliciously balanced, the second deliciously intense. Going back and forth, I couldn’t decide which one had won.
Which meant, of course, I already had.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
