AP Pizza is at once delightful and maddening. Dishing Pizza acknowledges that it gets emotional about pizza, but AP Pizza has a Jekyll and Hyde thing going that makes Dishing Pizza’s head spin.
First, the respectable and upstanding Dr. Jekyll side.
Dishing Pizza has roots in central New Jersey, where nearly all pizzas were cooked in steel gas ovens. The fanciest it got was making the pie on a pizza stone. Most strip mall complexes, and there were plenty of them, had decent, and sometimes excellent, pizzerias run by gruff Italian men.
AP Pizza bills itself as “Jersey Fresh” and claims its pizza is reminiscent of the pizzerias of the chef’s New Jersey/New York roots. Dishing Pizza cannot dispute this claim because the pizza does indeed harken back to Dishing Pizza’s salad days in New Jersey. Dishing Pizza’s carry-out slice was sheathed in a white, triangular box. In-house, they serve slices on cheapo white, scalloped paper plates just like all the parlors of Dishing Pizza’s youth. The components are each excellent – a rich, fresh sauce that’s neither bland nor spicy, high-quality mozzarella, and a chewy but not doughy crust. This is terrific, unfussy pizza.
Now for the evil Mr. Hyde side. Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
- Location – Anyone new to Bethesda would be hard-pressed to imagine it used to be a sleepy, unsophisticated town. Today, every storefront in Bethesda is glammed up to attract botoxed Bethesdans — it’s the only way businesses can afford the sky-high rents. That said, a real New Jersey pizza shop would be a fish out of water in today’s Bethesda. However, AP Pizza Shop fits right in because it gussied itself up, belying its humble origin story. The AP Pizza shop makes a great product, but it’s too fancy to be authentic. Dishing Pizza would like this place a lot better in a grittier location with less gloss and a few more cockroaches.
- Dinner menu – AP’s dinner menu only has 12″ $15 personal pizzas. Although Dishing Pizza is not a fan, it understands that wood-fired ovens are small and necessitate small pizzas. AP making 12″ pizzas in their big deck oven is not only greedy, but it’s also anything but a love letter to the pizzerias of Chef Mike Friedman’s youth in New York and New Jersey. AP is small with just a handful of tables, so most people will carry out or get delivery. It’s one thing to share a pizza and a $15 salad when eating there. But Dishing Pizza wants either a 16″ or an 18″ carryout pizza at night, goddammit.
- Oh, please – The AP Menu’s classic font and scalloped edges suggest old-style New Jersey pizza. Call Dishing Pizza grumpy, but the inclusion of “Sammiches” and “Dippies” on the menu instead of “Sandwiches” and “Dips” pisses off Dishing Pizza. Furthermore, why does anyone need these $4 dippies?
AP Pizza Shop
4747 Bethesda Ave, Bethesda, MD 20814
Pizza quality: 🍕🍕🍕🍕
Overall experience: ⭐⭐⭐
Slice price: $5.00
Slice price per square inch: $0.16
Slice greed factor: 🤑🤑🤑🤑
Pie price: $23.00
Pie price per square inch: $0.09