Pizza Delicious

What the Crust Argument Is Actually About

The Italian principle that matters most in pizza is also the one most frequently violated: do less, but do it correctly. The case for great pizza is almost always a case against excess — too much cheese masks the fermentation in the dough, too much sauce drowns the char, and too many toppings turn a platform of technique into a cargo hold. Pizza Delicious was built around the opposite instinct. The founding premise, carried over from a Sunday night pop-up run by two New York college roommates who could not find a satisfying slice in New Orleans, was calibration. The right amount of cheese. Sauce that stops short of sweetness. A crust that holds dual textures — crispy at the base, chewy through the cornicione, without resolving into either cracker or bread.

That calibration is not accidental. Michael Friedman and Greg Augarten taught themselves the craft before the pop-up became permanent in 2012, and the discipline of that self-education shows in what the pizza does not do. It does not announce itself. It does not compensate with volume. Consistency at that volume, over more than a decade of service, is itself a form of restraint.

For comparison, the pizzerias that tend to draw the most sustained critical attention across North America, places like Ken's Artisan Pizza in Portland and 11th Street Pizza in Miami, share a similar philosophy: a short menu anchored by dough that takes time, and a refusal to pad the offering with unnecessary additions. Pizza Delicious belongs to that same critical tradition, even if the Bywater context gives it a different neighborhood register entirely.

The Bywater Situation

New Orleans has a layered restaurant culture that runs from the white-tablecloth refinement of places like Saint-Germain and Re Santi e Leoni down through the mid-range American contemporary tier represented by Zasu, and further still into the cheap eats category where Pizza Delicious operates. The Bywater, once a working-class neighborhood east of the Marigny, has developed a restaurant scene in recent years that leans independent and informal. It is not a neighborhood that performs for tourists in the way the Quarter does, which makes it a natural home for a pizzeria whose value proposition is honesty rather than spectacle. For those arriving from the French Quarter or the Garden District, the Bywater requires deliberate navigation, but the OAD ranking provides a concrete reason to make that trip, one that sits outside the usual New Orleans dining conversation about Creole gumbos and raw oyster bars.

How It Sits Against the New Orleans Field

The New Orleans dining field at the national recognition level tends to cluster around cuisine types that are specific to the city's history and geography: Creole cooking, Gulf Coast seafood, and the kind of deeply local American cuisine that takes decades and regional ingredients to build. Pizza, by contrast, is a category where New Orleans has never claimed particular authority. The significance of Pizza Delicious in the OAD Cheap Eats ranking is partly that it competes on national terms rather than local ones.

That said, the restaurant's competitive advantage is not technique alone. The Bywater location, the informal format, and the price point place it in a tier where value-per-execution matters as much as any single technical element. Across the broader New Orleans dining scene covered in our full New Orleans restaurants guide, Pizza Delicious occupies a specific and useful role: it is the place you go when the multi-course tasting menus and the heritage Creole institutions are not what the evening calls for, but you still want something that has been thought about carefully.

Planning a Visit

Pizza Delicious is closed Mondays. Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday, the kitchen runs from 11:30am to 9pm. Friday and Saturday extend to 10pm. There is no booking system listed for the restaurant, which is consistent with its counter-service or casual walk-in format. Coming on a weekday or arriving close to the 11:30am opening offers the most direct path to a table.

For visitors building a broader New Orleans itinerary, the city's full hospitality offering is covered across our New Orleans hotels guide, our bars guide, our wineries guide, and our experiences guide. For those who want to understand where Pizza Delicious sits within the broader national fine dining conversation, the reference points are the long-format tasting experiences at places like Le Bernardin in New York, Alinea in Chicago, Lazy Bear in San Francisco, The French Laundry in Napa, Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg, and Providence in Los Angeles, restaurants operating at entirely different price points and formats, but sharing the same underlying principle: that discipline and clarity of execution are what separate a good meal from a forgettable one.