There’s something so alluring and irresistible about the simple combination of dough, sauce and cheese fresh out of the oven, which may explain why pizza shops are always opening. Here are six Montgomery County spots that have opened since 2023 and garnered our attention.
AP Pizza Shop
We’re fans of Aventino, the Roman Jewish-inspired Italian restaurant that chef Mike Friedman’s RedStone Restaurant Group, which includes business partners Mike O’Malley, Colin McDonough and Gareth Croke, opened in Bethesda in January 2024, so it’s no surprise that we give a thumps-up to AP Pizza Shop, the adjacent 800-square-foot, 19-seat pizzeria that opened with it. In addition to The Red Hen in D.C., the company’s portfolio includes two locations of All-Purpose Pizzeria (AP’s namesake), so Friedman’s experience with pizza-making professionally dates to 2016 when the first All-Purpose opened in D.C.
Friedman, who is 43 and lives in Olney, drew inspiration for All-Purpose from Westfield, New Jersey, the predominantly Italian suburb of New York City where he grew up. He refers to his New York-style pizzas as New Jersey-style, a nostalgic nod to Ferraro’s and Cosimo’s, his family’s go-to restaurants for pizza there. (Those establishments are still going strong.)
Forty percent of the flour in Friedman’s dough is whole wheat, which gives it a nuttier flavor and chewier texture than most New York-style doughs. The rest is King Arthur-brand 00 (double zero) white pizza flour. He enhances the dough with diastatic malt powder, which adds caramel notes and umami, and uses a starter to make it, which lends sourdough notes. The dough ferments in the refrigerator for three days. The pies bake at 565 degrees on stone in electric PizzaMaster deck ovens.
AP offers six pies by the slice or whole (18-inch) from 11:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. Standard cheese pizza is $5/$23; all others are $6/$30. After 4 p.m., 10 types of 12-inch pizzas ($15 to $21) are available (whole only; no 18-inch pies after 4 p.m.). At lunch, you can mix and match eight slices to make a pie ($40). Standouts include the Funghi (Parmesan, mushrooms, onions, rosemary and black truffle sauce), the Sedgewick (whipped ricotta, Taleggio cheese, Parmesan, truffle honey, chives) and the Il Supremo (black olives, sausage, pepperoni, peppers, mozzarella, Parmesan).
4747 Bethesda Ave., Bethesda, 301-961-6451, appizzashop.com
Red Hound Pizza
It makes perfect sense that onetime pharmacy students Charbel Abrache, 37, and Andrea Alvarez, 35, wound up making bespoke pizza. At Red Hound Pizza, which the husband and wife opened in Takoma Park in July 2024, they combine various compounds with precision to create amalgams people ingest to feel better.
A year into the pharmacy school at which they met in their native Venezuela, Abrache switched course and went to culinary school in Caracas. He then trained to become a pastry chef in Argentina, got into bread- and pizza-making and wound up in Tarrytown, New York, in 2016 working at famed chef Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant. There he met baker Jonathan Bethony, who expanded his horizons. “I wasn’t into fresh-milled flours at the time or different grains,” Abrache says. “In Venezuela, there were only two options for flour: white flour or cake flour.” He took a job in Washington, D.C., when Bethony opened Seylou Bakery & Mill in 2017 and remained there, developing and running its pastry and pizza program, until a few months before Red Hound opened.
Abrache, Alvarez and their 22-month-old son, Tomas, live in Takoma Park, D.C. The 450-square-foot restaurant, named after the couple’s basset hound, seats 10 inside and 20 outside. Abrache offers four kinds of Roman-style pizza daily, baked in olive oil-coated 12-by-12-inch pans in a Moretti Forni electric deck oven imported from Italy.
Abrache’s dough is crispy, lofty and ultra-flavorful, with nutty umami undertones, its whole grains sourced from local millers such as Migrash Farm and Purple Mountain Grown in Maryland, and Grapewood Farm in Virginia. “The germ and bran add weight, so there isn’t as much volume in the dough as with white flour. Whole grains also make creating gluten harder,” Abrache says. (Glutens are the strands of protein and water that expand and trap air to make bread rise.) He uses two starters, one yeast-based, called a poolish, and one sourdough, to boost leavening during its overnight ferment.
Two kinds of pizza, versions of pepperoni and Margherita, are always available. The other two offerings, rotated every two weeks, are always a vegan option and another that’s meat-based. All are sold as 12-inch-square whole pizzas ($28 to $33), by the slice ($4.50 for Margherita; $5 for all others) or half and half of two kinds. A veggie offering we sampled—with sunchokes, black olives, za’atar and parsley sauce—was otherworldly, as was the pepperoni topped with dollops of whipped ricotta.
7050 Carroll Ave., Takoma Park, 240-531-2988, redhoundpizza.com
No Regrets Pizza Co.
Richard Weiner, who opened No Regrets Pizza Co. in May 2024, likes to talk about the four P’s: “I picked everything, I procured everything, I placed everything, and I paid for everything,” he says, referring to the 2,400-square-foot, 45-seat (plus 32 outside) North Bethesda restaurant he co-owns with business partner Nicholas Framarini. Weiner, 67, has been a mortgage broker for 35 years and will soon be moving his Bethesda-based business, Mortgage Star, into a 1,000-square-foot space adjacent to No Regrets. The expansion will also house a new prep kitchen and oven, the dishwashing station and a separate takeout facility.
Weiner started experimenting with Neapolitan-style pizza dough in 2017, having been inspired by visits with his wife, Nancy, to pizzerias around the U.S. “We thought we could do better. I tried making my own dough but had no idea. I got on the internet and maybe 300, 400, 500 variations later, I think I got it,” Weiner says. To hone the craft, he opened a pizzeria of sorts at his home in Potomac’s Avenel neighborhood with an Italian brick oven, a bar, a communal table and a firepit, and started making pizzas for friends on weekends and getting feedback.
Why would an already successful person take on the notoriously risky restaurant business? “Beginning the last third of my life, I wanted to do something that made me happy and that I could share with others. Most of my friends said I would have massive regrets in this decision, so I decided to name it No Regrets,” Weiner says. “Who knows? They might be right.”
Not content to do just one thing well, Weiner offers three styles of pizza: 12-inch round artisanal (Neapolitan-style, with a thin crust, very puffy perimeter and soupy center), 18-inch round New York-style (thin but firm-in-the-center crust with a slightly puffy perimeter) and rectangular Roman-style (thick crust baked in an 8-by-12-inch pan). The three doughs, all fermented for a minimum of 72 hours, have different mixing processes, hydrations and salt levels. Each pizza cooks at a different temperature for a different amount of time in separate PizzaMaster deck ovens that have differing stone bases. “The thickness of the stone determines how much heat it holds, and the texture determines how much contact the dough has with it,” Weiner says. “I made it really complicated.”
It pays off, though. No Regrets offers roughly 11 kinds of pizza, plus daily specials, on their on-site menu, which changes frequently. Most are available in all three styles. (Margherita is artisanal only.) Roman and artisanal pies are $17 to $23; New York pizzas are $24 to $33. We like all three styles but are especially fond of Roman-style with mashed potatoes, mozzarella and asiago cheese, scallions and bacon; New York-style cheese with julienne strips of basil; and artisanal pear with blue cheese, arugula and balsamic drizzle.
5454 Nicholson Lane, Suite 180, North Bethesda, 301-200-3003, noregretspizza.com
El Jefe Wood Fired Pizza
Chef Edwin Garcia, 38, got into the pizza game in 2019, when he graduated from the culinary arts program at the Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School in D.C. and started an internship at Cipolla Rossa Pizzeria, a mobile business selling pizzas in the D.C. area from a wood-fired oven on wheels. Garcia began working in the food industry when he was 17—at The Cheesecake Factory, various delis and George Washington University—with the goal of opening his own business one day.
When Cipolla Rossa’s owners moved to Florida, Garcia, who lives in Hanover, Maryland, decided to go into business for himself, buying a mobile wood-fired pizza oven from Fiero Forni, a company based in Brewster, New York. In 2022, he started El Jefe Wood Fired Pizza, catering events and selling 10-inch pizzas at the Bethesda Central Farm Market on Sundays. (He continues to sell at the market.) He opened a stall in Silver Spring’s Solaire Social food hall in July 2024. The oven there is gas-fired, per the building’s regulations.
Garcia’s menu features 10-inch pies ($13 to $17) in 10 varieties, one of them vegan. They are Neapolitan-style: thin-crusted and slightly soupy in the center after having been cooked in an 800- to 900-degree oven for 90 seconds. That produces a puffy-crust perimeter dotted with leopard spots of char. The dough is made with high-gluten flour and Italian 00 (double zero) flour and, as leaveners, sourdough starter for tang and a small amount of yeast.
Along with standards such as Margherita and caprese pizzas, Garcia has two unique offerings based on Mexican street foods. “I always wanted to infuse Mexican cuisine in pizza. I’m not Mexican, but I used to live there,” says Garcia, who moved to the U.S. from Guatemala in 2003. He started making his street corn pizza, loaded with corn, mozzarella, cotija cheese, chipotle aioli and cilantro, during his first summer at the farmers market when there was a surfeit of corn from other vendors. His birria pizza is rife with mozzarella, Jack cheese, cilantro, red onions, and beef that has been braised in a flavorful broth and shredded. It’s served with a side of braising liquid just like birria tacos are.
8200 Dixon Ave. (Solaire Social), Silver Spring, 571-623-9380, solairesocial.com
Andy’s Pizza
Andy Brown, who owns the D.C.-area chainlet Andy’s Pizza, is a Montgomery County guy—born in Takoma Park, raised in Silver Spring and then Rockville, and a graduate of St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac. So it was only a matter of time before he’d open a MoCo location, which he did in Bethesda in September 2023, a stone’s throw from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. It seats 70 inside and 40 outside. (It also features a mini beer and wine shop.)
It took a while for Brown, who’s 35 and now lives in Arlington, Virginia, to get in the pizza groove. He studied business at Stevenson University in Baltimore County (“It took me six years to graduate. I had trouble in school,” he admits), then worked as a DJ and in restaurants owned by D.C.-based Mission Group. An avid home cook, Brown took up bread-making, which segued into pizza. (“Bread topped with things,” he observes, aptly.) It became an obsession. He ordered a 120-volt commercial pizza oven for his D.C. studio apartment and started having industry nights for his restaurant pals on Mondays, all the while maintaining spreadsheets of dough hydrations and fermentation times, and making adjustments. In 2017, he took a leap and launched Eat Pizza, a frozen pizza company he operated from a commercial shared kitchen space. (The pizzas, now produced in a D.C. facility Brown owns, are available in Whole Foods and other outlets.)
Brown opened his first Andy’s Pizza in Tysons Galleria in 2018. He has 11 locations and plans to have 15 by the end of the year, including Gaithersburg, Silver Spring and Westfield Montgomery mall.
“We call it New York-style, but it’s not really,” Brown says. “New York pizza is cooked at 500 degrees for 10 minutes, and Neapolitan is 900 degrees for 90 seconds. We bake ours at 700 for five minutes on stone in a Bakers Pride oven, so we have a bastard-style pizza.” Whatever it is, it’s terrific, with a thin, flavorful crust whose dough undergoes a three-day cold fermentation process that gives it a slight tang. The sauce is made with tomatoes and salt, nothing else. The cheese is Grande-brand whole milk mozzarella from Wisconsin. That combination of dough, sauce and cheese won Brown a top prize at the International Pizza Challenge in Las Vegas in 2021.
Andy’s offers 11 pies (18-inch, $22.50 to $32.50), five of them classic (such as cheese, pepperoni, and sausage and pepper) and six of them specialty (such as burrata Margherita, carnivore, and the house specialty, made with pepperoni cups, burrata, Mike’s Hot Honey and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese). Most pizzas are available by the slice ($4.50, classic; $6 or $7, specialty). One pizza, the Miller Time, is plant-based. The indecisive can opt for 8 Makes a Pie ($26.50), mixing and matching any eight classic slices.
4600 East West Highway, Bethesda, 240-204-6883, eatandyspizza.com
Colony Grill
Colony Grill is a nine-outlet East Coast chain of Irish pubs based in Connecticut, where it started in Stamford in 1935. Its first Maryland location opened in the back of Cabin John Village’s mini-mall in June 2023, seating 175 in its dining room, bar and patio.
The only items on the food menu are their signature 12-inch bar pies made of thin, crustless rounds of dough (almost like a large cracker), baked with a thick layer of cheese and drizzled with zesty chili-infused oil. The basic pizza is $11.95, plus $1.95 per topping, such as sausage, cherry peppers, stringer peppers and bacon. We love the breakfast pizza ($14.95) with a thin layer of scrambled eggs covering the pie’s surface, which is dotted with a choice of bacon or sausage. There is a salad on the menu, but there’s a hitch: It’s piled on top of a bar pizza ($14.95).
Colony Grill’s decor features a Wall of Heroes with framed photos of first responders and veterans. Diners can submit photos of folks (in uniform) they wish to honor.
11325 Seven Locks Road (Cabin John Village), Potomac, 301-985-2000, colonygrill.com
Inside job
Here are three pizza sources that popped up in unexpected places in the last few years:
Inside the Burger King food court at 16004 Shady Grove Road in Gaithersburg is Ripieno’s Express, an outpost of Ripieno’s Italian Bistro of Ocean City, Maryland. They offer thin-crusted, extra-cheesy 16-inch ($17 to $21) or 28-inch ($30 to $40) wood-fired pizzas. The 28-inch cheese and pepperoni pizzas are available by the (enormous) slice ($9 and $10). @ripienosshadygrove on Instagram
Inside the red-and-white automated PizzaForno vending machine in Silver Spring are 12-inch pies that come out boxed, piping hot and delicious in four minutes. We tried the pepperoni ($11.99) and meat lovers (pepperoni, ground beef, sausage, bacon, oregano, mozzarella, $13.99). Vegetarian, four cheese, barbecue chicken, and a breakfast pie with scrambled eggs and bacon are also available. The machine on the street in front of 8750 Georgia Ave. holds 70 pizzas. thepizzaforno.com
Inside Corned Beef King’s carryout at 330-C N. Stonestreet Ave. in Rockville on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 5 to 10 p.m., Rockville resident Jason Hubbarth operates Pizza Monkey, selling Detroit-style pizzas (baked in pans with tomato sauce on top of the cheese) for carryout and delivery. Large (8-by-14-inches, eight squares) is $20; small (8-by-10-inches, four squares) is $14. Toppings are extra ($1.50 small; $2 large). thepizzamonkey.com
One pizzeria, two dreams
Chef and Silver Spring resident Ruth Gresser always dreamed of owning her own restaurant, and she achieved that goal in 1991 when she opened Pizzeria Paradiso in Dupont Circle. She was 32. Now, her thin-crusted, Neapolitan-style pizzas baked in wood-burning ovens are available at four locations, including Upper Northwest D.C.’s Spring Valley neighborhood. In September, Gresser made Carlos Delgado, who started working for Pizzeria Paradiso as a dishwasher in 2000, a part owner and the managing partner of the business. “When I turned 50, I told Barbara [Johnson, my wife] I was going to retire, so I’m 15 years late,” Gresser says.
Over the years, many people approached Gresser to buy or buy into her business, but she preferred to transfer ownership to staff. Delgado was always part of those conversations. “He has been the day-to-day in the kitchen for the last 15 years, and for the last five has grown into full operations,” Gresser says. “At the appropriate time, I will stop being as available for him to consult and he will buy out my shares. We are still figuring that part out.”
Now 44, Delgado grew up poor in El Salvador, where his mother washed clothes for other people. He immigrated to the U.S. at 18 and got a job at Paradiso. He hated dishwashing and got it into his head one day to try making pizza dough in the restaurant’s giant mixer, which exploded with flour when he turned it on. Gresser was walking into the kitchen at that moment. Delgado expected to be fired, but Gresser burst out laughing and a mentorship and true friendship were born. Gresser attended Delgado’s U.S. citizenship ceremony in 2017. He met his wife, Maria Velasquez, at Paradiso, where she was a cook. They married in 2002 and live in Beltsville, Maryland. She’s currently the kitchen leader at the Dupont Circle location.
Delgado doesn’t plan to make big changes. “We have great food and great service already. We just want to keep that going and maintain the culture that Ruth created. We may add brunch. The dream is to open more places,” he says.
Says Gresser, “People ask me why I chose Carlos, but I always tell them he chose himself.”
Pizzeria Paradiso, 4850 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, D.C., 202-885-9101, eatyourpizza.com
This appears in the May/June 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
