History · Restored legacy address
The Press
The old page had two links on it and the word CLICK HERE twice. Fifteen years later, one of those links is the only proof of something that otherwise left no trace.
Pizza Moto's press page was about as unadorned as a press page gets. Two lines of text, each followed by a link labeled CLICK HERE. That was the whole thing.
From the archive · pizzamotobklyn.com/The_Press_.html
"Featured in the New York Times" → nytimes.com/2008/11/05/dining/05pizza.html
"Featured in Serious Eats New York" → newyork.seriouseats.com/tags/Pizza Moto
Both of those targets are, in 2026, difficult or impossible to reach. Serious Eats New York was folded into its parent site years ago and the tag archive did not survive the move. The Times URL still has the shape of a live article but did not return to us during research.
Which makes the archived page more useful than it looks. A dated capture showing that a business linked to a specific New York Times dining URL in 2009 is evidence that the coverage existed, even when the coverage itself is no longer retrievable. That is a modest thing to be able to establish, and it is the reason this page is worth keeping rather than deleting.
The reconstructed record
What follows is every piece of coverage we could trace and verify, in order. Where we could read the piece, we say what it contains. Where we could not, we say that too.
| Date | Publication | What it establishes | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 Nov 2008 | The New York Times, dining | That Pizza Moto was covered by the Times within months of starting. | Link recorded on the 2009 press page. Article not retrievable during research; cited as a link the historical site made, not as a source read. |
| 28 Oct 2009 | The Martha Stewart Blog | Photographs of the stall at the Brooklyn Flea; the Margherita; the apple-derived sourdough starter; Dave described as a former architecture student and a chef at Lunetta. Links to pizzamotobklyn.com. | Live, read in full. |
| 7 Apr 2010 | New World Review — Nicholas Gill | “A portable wood fired brick oven is the secret to this mobile pizza shop… Pies are small, Neapolitan style.” Links to the domain. | Live, read in full. |
| 8 Dec 2010 | Mobile Food News | The September 2008 Fort Greene debut; Sclarow as chef de cuisine at Lunetta; the crew working off a folding table; grana and oil to finish. Quotes /The_Oven.html verbatim. | Live, read in full. |
| Oct 2013 | Eat This NY | A review from the trailer period. | Located but not read in full. |
| 29 Oct 2015 | Time Out New York | The restaurant: 338 Hamilton Ave; chef-owners Sclarow and Anna Viertel; the turn-of-the-century oven found behind a wall; cast-iron restored, coal converted to wood; school-desk bar stools, bowling-alley tables, soapstone bar; the cigar maker who had the space before. | Live, read in full. |
| 22 Dec 2016 | Brooklyn Based | Anna Viertel of Pizza Moto, interviewed. | Located; corroborates her role as co-owner. |
| Feb 2017 | For the Love of Pizza | The two-year, largely owner-performed build-out — plumbing, welding, electrical. | Located. |
| 19 Jan 2023 | Andrea Strong | The closing announcement: last service Sunday 19 February 2023; the lease was up; Betsy Devine taking over pizza operations. | Live, read in full. |
The pattern in the coverage
Read in sequence, the press record does something the company's own pages cannot: it shows which details outsiders found worth writing down. Three recur without fail.
- The oven is always the lede. Every single piece, from 2009 to 2023, opens on the oven. Not the pizza — the machine.
- The apples get mentioned twice, independently. Two different writers, eighteen months apart, both chose to record the apple-derived starter. That is how a detail becomes verified rather than merely claimed.
- The chef's day job keeps surfacing. Lunetta in 2009 and 2010, Esca by 2015. Writers kept noting that this was not an amateur operation wearing a trailer as a costume.
On link rot
Two of the nine entries above point at things that have effectively vanished from the live web — one because a publication reorganized, one because an archive URL no longer resolves for us. Neither business did anything wrong. This is simply what happens to links over fifteen years.
It is also the argument for this whole project. The material that survived did so because the Internet Archive captured it, and because one of the citations was quoted at length inside another article rather than merely linked. Quoting is more durable than linking. We have tried to behave accordingly: where a source says something that matters, we reproduce the words rather than pointing at them and hoping.