Roberta’s

January 12, 2008

Several months ago, a wood-burning pizza oven was delivered across the street to a nondescript cinderblock building next to an auto body repair shop. At the time, it had a sign above the door that read, E.S.P. Construction Corp.. An odd place for a restaurant, perhaps, but someone had a vision. I watched eagerly out my window as spring turned to summer, summer to fall, and the new year came and went. "When the hell is that pizza place going to open?"

Several weeks ago, the Construction Corp. sign was finally replaced by a new one, "Roberta's."

Progress.

Walking home from work last week, I noticed the lights were on, and when a few people exited the building, I could hear a crowd murmuring through the open door. After all that watching and waiting, the restaurant's grand opening arrived without a clue. Without a clue to a clueless guy like me, that is, but not for everyone else. I squeezed past a few people who were leaving, took a peek inside, and found the place packed from wall to wood-paneled wall. Other than free beer, nothing draws a crowd like free pizza. At the counter, the thick and hungry masses jostled for position, and rather than joining the fray, I decided that I’d waited this long, I could wait a little longer.

The next day, a square of cardboard was taped to the graffiti-strewn gray metal front door, with a hand-written note scrawled across it in magic marker: "Thanks for making the grand opening a huge success," or something like that. "See you on Friday."

Yesterday, the restaurant officially opened, and just as the note predicted, they “saw us on Friday.”

No free pizza this time. The rustic ski-camp feel of the wood paneling under the high loft ceiling, cords of wood stacked near the doorway, long, beer hall style tables, and the smell of burning wood was great, but 40 bucks for a couple of pizzas, including coffee and dessert (no liquor license yet) quickly dashed any illusions of eating there five nights a week. Still, the pizza was great, and you certainly can't beat the convenience, so I suppose it could be worse.

Sitting at the long banquet table next to ours was a guy with a notebook and a camera, taking pictures and scribbling notes for a blog or a newspaper. It led me to do a Google search when I got home. Sifting through countless blog posts and newspaper articles, pro and con, everybody is talking about Bushwick.

Bushwick is a big area, and getting bigger apparently — East Williamsburg claiming to be Bushwick to disassociate itself from the increasingly yuppified image of Williamsburg (guilty), and Bed-Sty landlords calling their neighborhood Bushwick to disassociate their listings from you name it.

I found an article from a website called "The Edge" about Bushwick emerging as the "new" artist colony. I guess the guy who wrote it didn't see the article in the New York Times Magazine nearly two years ago, or the one in Village Voice before that.

This guy recently got his head bashed in at my friendly neighborhood subway stop, leading another guy to comment on bushwickbk.com that the guy who got hit deserved it because “40-year-olds don't belong in shithole apartments in industrial neighborhoods anyway.” I wonder how he feels about expensive pizza restaurants.