Surly’s New Pizza Restaurant Possesses an Obvious Name, But An Eastern Style

Months after shutting down the critically lauded upstairs restaurant Brewer’s Table inside Surly’s large Minneapolis Brewery, the installation of a pizza restaurant is almost complete. Surly Pizza Upstairs expects to start serving a Connecticut style pizza March 30. The name is a no-brainer, but New Haven-style will be a new way to serve pizza in the Twin Cities.

The style of pie hails from Connecticut and has been an obsession of chef Ben Peine’s. Out East they’re better known as “apizzas,” a riff on Neapolitan-style, but “hotter, crispier, and dirtier,” according to Amy Kundrat, the Connecticut-based author of Eater’s Definitive Guide to New Haven Pizza. Apizza has a thin, bubbled crust that gets a long, cold fermentation to develop its distinctive flavor. It also isn’t doesn’t usually, as rule, come with a thick layer of cheese topping. As a rule, mozzarella is a topping akin to pepperoni or sausage. Plain apizza just has tomato sauce on it.

New Haven is also where white clam pizza originated and it’s expected to make an appearance on Surly’s menu as well.

After closing Brewer’s Table, the next evolution of the upstairs restaurant at Surly was in question, but those behind it didn’t want to overthink what would come next. Peine knew that pizza and beer makes for one classic pairing. That same logic was applied to the naming process.

• The Definitive Guide to New Haven Pizzas [E]
• Surly Doubles Down on Bar Food with Pizza [ETC]
• Surly Pizza Upstairs [WEB]