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Ops Is Expanding to the East Village
Photo: Courtesy of the subject
Since opening in 2016, Bushwick’s Ops has become a destination for its sourdough, Neapolitan-ish pizza. The pies are wood-fried and ornamented with broccoli rabe and ricotta salata; the sides include marinated butter beans; and the wines are, of course, natural. But growing up in St. Louis, Mike Fadem — a co-owner with Marie Tribouilloy and Gavin Compton — was raised on a different kind of pie, a midwestern thin crust epitomized by the local chain Imo’s. Its cracker crust is baked hard until rigid enough to be cut into squares, and topped with precooked tomato sauce and gooey processed-cheese mix known as Provel. “I was eating it before I remember,” Fadem says. “My dad is obsessed with all these little mom-and-pop places in St. Louis, and they’re all the same — but he can tell the difference.” One of the pizzas at Ops, the Cicero, is named for a favorite childhood spot. “He’ll be like, ‘The dough here, the dough is amazing.’”
Now, Fadem has the chance to give his childhood more than a single honorary pie: Next week, he, Tribouilloy, and Compton will open a second location of Ops in the East Village. (A fourth partner, Alex Alan, is also involved and will run service.) The dining room is mostly recessed, with a street-level section up front that has a banquette for ten and overlooks the rest of the space. There are more deep-red banquettes down the ramp, a custom-made stainless-steel bar, and wineglasses printed with a cute drawing (by Tribouilloy) of mortadella.
This Ops was not opened specifically so Fadem could explore the possibilities of St. Louis pizza, but it did give him a reason to ask, What if we Ops-ified it? He’s had cracker crusts on the mind for a while now. Since last June, he’s been tinkering away at his Williamsburg restaurant, Leo, which has the same PizzaMaster oven he’ll use in the East Village. Fadem figured out the recipe with RJ Sansotta, the chef of Ops (who maintains an affinity for Domino’s thin crust), after a research trip to the Midwest: “I thought at first it was kind of an experiment. Can we do this with our sourdough and cool flours? What does that look like? We were just sort of fucking around,” Fadem says. They tried an intensive recipe they didn’t like, studied a video detailing the Imo’s pizza process, and ate tavern pizza around Chicago to examine all the methods. But they found their gold standard at Zaffiro’s in Milwaukee: “The way they do it is the way to do it.”
The 11-inch pies at Ops are called “tavernettas”; they won’t be a one-for-one re-creation of St. Louis thin crust, and nobody’s going to confuse the Ops Pisalladiere for Imo’s Sweet Heat. It’s a riff on the Provençal flatbread with its trio of caramelized onions, black olives, and anchovies. The classic will be just that: Caputo Brothers mozzarella (sorry, no Provel) with tomatoes, cheese, oregano, probably a little chile and garlic. The Hawaiian — well, you know what that is. “For some reason, people bring it up all the time,” Fadem says. They’re using coppa, the cured pork shoulder. “It reminded me of Canadian bacon when we baked it on a pizza. And the pineapple is baked on; we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here.”
Even if experimentation is not the focus, developing a recipe for cracker crust did give the team another idea: “We were thinking about all these Michelin restaurants in Copenhagen and all these places that make these crackers with all this stuff that wouldn’t normally go into pizza dough,” Fadem says. Using whole wheat in regular pizza dough is difficult because of the way it needs to rise. Flatter crackers don’t have that issue. So they landed on a recipe that’s 50 percent whole-wheat flour, which Fadem says gives the tarevnetta pizzas a more dynamic flavor — but he doesn’t want anyone mistaking it for health food: “Anybody can like it and not be like, This is yuppy shit, granola or whatever.”
Along with the tavernettas, there will be the sourdough pizzas that Ops is known for, like the Rojo with its mortadella blanket over pickled peppers. Unlike in Bushwick, though, the space here has a proper kitchen where they can cook foods like lasagna and roasted La Salumina sausage with marinated greens. Otherwise, the usual dishes have been brought over from across the East River: the salads with vinaigrette, lentils like they served in the early years in Bushwick, flourless chocolate cake. And finally, there’ll be plenty of wine, plus cocktails courtesy of Cedric Obando, the GM of the original Ops in Bushwick.
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