:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65425691/red_pizza.0.jpg)
Times critic Pete Wells doles out a lofty two stars for Rick Easton’s new Jersey City slice shop Bread & Salt — which serves some of the “most elevated” slices in the New York area, he writes in his latest review.
Easton’s pizza has a “noticeably lightweight” crust and an interior that’s “honeycombed with air pockets,” he writes, comparing the slice shop to other highly regarded names like Mama’s Too and Corner Slice. And the toppings are just as good, he writes:
This structural soundness is key to the pleasure. The toppings on a Bread and Salt slice are not decorations or seasonings, as they often are on round pizza. Each one is the point of its slice: a mix of fresh mushrooms with pepper, parsley and flecks of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano; zucchini shaved into fine threads and showered at the last minute with mint leaves; slices of late-summer red and yellow peppers picked while they still had few faintly bitter streaks of green reaching up their sides; a rough, dark pesto spooned around cherry tomatoes that were roasted until their skins turned black and pulled away from the globes of pulp inside; Concord grapes that blotch the dough with purple like exploded jelly grenades.
The review pumps Jersey City into pizza destination status — in 2017, Wells wrote that the best pizza in New York was in New Jersey in his three-star review of Razza, another pizzeria in the New Jersey city.
Aside from the pizza at Bread & Salt, Wells also praises Easton’s tripe stew, meatballs, a warm mortadella sandwich, and “excellent” sourdough bread. Eater critic Ryan Sutton has also stopped by, calling Easton’s “some of the finest slices in the tri-state area.”
But Wells does warn diners that Bread & Salt isn’t the easiest restaurant to get in touch with and its hours aren’t the most reliable — on one visit, the restaurant opened at 2 p.m. instead of 1 p.m., which was the opening time written on a sign on the front door. Two stars.
