Jason P.
Yelp
Rossitto's. In summary, I think this is currently a deli, cafe, bakery/pastry shop, and fresh pasta place first and foremost, and a pizza place in a very distant third or fourth. The pizza needs a lot of work, but by all means, come for the deli (sandwiches and salads look great), bakery items, and homemade pastas.
Let's start with the good: The shop is immaculate and nice, with many high-quality imported items from Italy on the shelves, including the salumi. Owners are super friendly and are willing to listen so that is a big plus.
They make a very nice cappuccino on the Rancilio machine. I'd come here for a coffee and a pastry, no question.
They bake most of their own pastries and bread and have various cooked items like lasagne, rice balls, eggplant parm, cutlets, etc. The sausage bread I brought home was really good.
They make their own Italian sausage and dry and cure their own soppressata at their Venice, FL location. They also make their own fresh mozzarella there (which they don't use on most of the pizza)
They make all kinds of ravioli and ribbon pasta fresh. I also had an opportunity to try their cooked pasta sauce (not the same as their pizza sauce, which is uncooked) with their all-beef meatballs and it was delicious; I would not hesitate to come back for a casual dinner and sit outside and have antipasti and pasta when the weather is nicer.
OK, the pizza. I have no other way of saying this; the pizza is not good. We tried it as both a reheated slice and also two different medium pies.
The oven they are using is a non-convection steel deck gas with a maximum temp of 575 degrees, and he is using a 00 flour (really should be using AP for a NY-style) with insufficient hydration. He's doing a 6-minute bake time which isn't long enough, resulting in a partially-baked pizza which you can clearly see from the uncooked top in the photo. Craig and I felt the crust was tasteless, likely not enough fermentation and salt. The sauce is an uncooked type that is not heavily processed and doesn't have any sugar added and not much oil in it. So we didn't get that much flavor out of it either. The cheese on the Margherita was a blend of fresh mozzarella AND a low moisture Grande unsalted, so overall the plain pie tastes very underseasoned.
The Pugliese pie with sausage and rapini improved it because it was a delicious sausage; the pork fat and extra virgin olive oil, and garlic with the sauteed rapini also improved the flavor, but it still didn't salvage the crust and the sauce.
Given that these people know how to bake bread and pastries, I think they can salvage it. Still, they probably need to switch the flour out, ferment the dough more to develop more flavor, and more hydration in the dough to make it stickier so they can bake it longer in the lower temperature oven without drying out the crust and burning it. But it clearly needs work, and if Mr. One Bite were to walk into this place and try that plain pie that we had, he'd destroy these poor people.
We told them all about the pizza -- they seemed to agree with some of the technical issues (they aren't particularly happy they had to settle for a different brand of oven than what they wanted due to availability) so they took both the pies we ordered off the bill.
