History · The company behind this domain
Pizza Moto: a Brooklyn history
It started with an oven built for someone else’s wedding, spent seven years under an expressway, and is still working. Here is what the record actually shows.
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Almost every account of Pizza Moto starts in the same place, because the company itself starts there: a hand-built wood-fired oven, a backyard wedding, and a group of restaurant cooks who thought they could pull it off. That is the phrasing on Pizza Moto's own site, and nothing in the record contradicts it. The year was 2008.
What follows is a timeline assembled from archived pages, contemporaneous reporting and the company's own statements. Where sources disagree, we say so rather than picking a winner.
2008: an oven, then a trailer
David Sclarow built the first oven to cook pizza at a colleague's wedding. He was not doing this as an outsider — at the time he was chef de cuisine at Lunetta in Cobble Hill, and had earlier worked at Esca. The oven was supposed to be a one-off favor. It became a business.
By September 2008, according to Mobile Food News, Pizza Moto was serving at the Fort Greene Brooklyn Flea, which had itself launched that April. In November, the operation appeared in the dining pages of The New York Times — the link to that piece was still sitting on Pizza Moto's own press page years later.
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2009–2011: the trailer years, documented
This is the period that this domain belongs to. Pizza Moto ran an Apple iWeb site at pizzamotobklyn.com, with pages for the oven, the dough, the ingredients, the Brooklyn Flea and the press. It is a small site, and a genuinely informative one.
Two things about the pizza recur in every contemporary description. The first is the starter: a wild-yeast sourdough cultured from local apples, mentioned by both Martha Stewart's blog in October 2009 and New World Review in April 2010. The second is scale — "pies are small, Neapolitan style," finished with grated grana padano and olive oil and cut into quarters.
And there is the oven itself, which by 2009 was the third attempt. The first two were conventional brick and mortar and, in the site's own words, were reduced to "shattered piles of rubble" by New York's streets. The replacement put a masonry hearth inside a double-walled vault of insulated 12-gauge diamond plate steel. That page is restored in full at its original address.
From the archive · pizzamotobklyn.com/Welcome.html
"A Mobile Brick Oven Pizzeria"
Destinations listed on the 2010 homepage: Brooklyn Flea · Central Park · SummerStage
When Smorgasburg spun out of Brooklyn Flea as a food-only market in 2011, Pizza Moto worked that too. The pattern of these years is a business with a serious kitchen pedigree operating out of a trailer, at markets, in parks, without a lease.
2013–2015: the wall comes down on Hamilton Avenue
The permanent home, when it came, was 338 Hamilton Avenue — an abandoned storefront on the Red Hook side of the Carroll Gardens line, between Centre and Mill Streets, directly beneath the Gowanus Expressway. Andrea Strong later described the setting as "Hamilton Avenue under the crumbling concrete awning of the BQE," which is exactly what it is.
During the build-out they found something behind the sheetrock: a massive turn-of-the-century oven, hidden inside the walls. Sclarow restored the masonry and the original cast-iron details, and converted it from coal to wood.
The build-out took roughly two years, much of it done by the owners themselves — plumbing, welding and electrical included. The interior was assembled from Brooklyn salvage in a way that reads now as almost a manifesto: bar stools welded from discarded Red Hook public-school desks, tables built from bowling-alley wood, a bar of reclaimed soapstone. The storefront had previously housed a cigar maker, and one of the cocktails was named after a cigar blend.
The restaurant opened in October 2015, with Dave Sclarow and Anna Viertel as chef-owners. Beyond the pizza there were composed plates that made sense of Sclarow's fine-dining background — cassoulet, steamed mussels, crispy chicken agrodolce.
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19 February 2023: the last service
In January 2023, Andrea Strong reported that Pizza Moto would close. The reason was unglamorous and extremely common: the lease was up. In her words, "after much complicated and bitter-sweet deliberation, the team decided to call it a decade." The last day of service was Sunday 19 February 2023.
A discrepancy we are not smoothing over
"A decade" and the documented run of the restaurant do not quite match. The dining room opened in October 2015 and closed in February 2023 — seven years and four months. The likely explanation is that the phrase counts from when Sclarow took the space, since the build-out and oven restoration ran about two years before opening. We state the service dates, which are firm, and leave the lease date alone, because no source we found gives it.
What did not close was Pizza Moto. The catering side continued. Betsy Devine — founder of Salvatore Bklyn ricotta, and, by the company's own account, the person whose wedding the first oven was built for — took over pizza operations. Today Pizza Moto is a woman-owned wood-fired catering company run by Devine and Kris, working weddings, farms and breweries across Brooklyn, the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. It trades at pizzamoto.com.
What happened to the oven
The oven stayed. In August 2023 the space reopened as Farina, a southern-Italian, grandma-style pizzeria from Tony Pisaniello, who by contemporary accounts took the lease largely because of what was in the wall. Farina closed in 2025.
In late 2025, chef Chris Milazzo and partner Sean Klim hoped to take the former Farina space for their restaurant Bad Cholesterol; the deal fell through, and they opened on Van Brunt Street instead, in October 2025. We have not found a confirmed tenant at 338 Hamilton Avenue since, and we are not going to guess.
Timeline
Pizza Moto begins. David Sclarow hand-builds a wood-fired oven for a colleague's backyard wedding.
Debuts at the Fort Greene Brooklyn Flea, which had opened that April.
Featured in The New York Times dining section — a link Pizza Moto kept on its press page for years.
The third oven enters service: masonry hearth, double-walled 12-gauge insulated steel vault. Described at /The_Oven.html.
Martha Stewart's blog covers the Brooklyn Flea, photographs the pizza, and links to pizzamotobklyn.com.
The homepage lists Brooklyn Flea, Central Park and SummerStage as destinations.
Smorgasburg launches as Brooklyn Flea's food-only offshoot. Pizza Moto works it.
The 338 Hamilton Avenue storefront is taken on. A turn-of-the-century oven is found behind a wall.
The restaurant opens, chef-owners Dave Sclarow and Anna Viertel, with the historic oven restored and converted from coal to wood.
Last day of restaurant service. The lease was up.
Farina opens in the space, drawn by the oven. It closes in 2025.
Pizza Moto continues as a woman-owned wood-fired catering company at pizzamoto.com.
To be plain about it
This page is history, written from documents. Pizza Moto Bklyn is not Pizza Moto, has no connection to it, and cannot take a booking. If you want the company, go to pizzamoto.com. Our About page sets out the whole arrangement.