It’s easy to feel young again in summertime—especially when restaurants and bars are coaxing out your inner child with boozy juice boxes, adult treehouses, and jars of ready-eat cookie dough. But if you want to be the coolest kid on the block, three words for ya: secret pizza bagels.
Casolare’s culinary geniuses have been quietly serving off-menu pizza bagels on weekend afternoons. The Glover Park restaurant recently launched an Italian-Jewish brunch with bagels and pizzas, but not pizza bagels. That all changed when chefs Matt Adler and Patrick Curran had an after-hours pizza bagel-off, as one does, to see who could make the best anytime-food. One threw together tomato sauce, melty cheese, and pepperoni; The other topped his with house-made sausage. Somehow word got out (Instagram) and boom! A kinda-secret special was born.
So here’s the bad news: the Bagel Bites jingle lied. When pizza’s on a bagel you CAN’T eat pizza anytime. The pizza bagels are only available during brunch—not in the evening, not at suppertime. And get this: only twelve are offered per day. The two halves are $12 each, which is still more expensive than a 40-count party pack of Bagel Bites on Amazon (don’t tempt us). But! What Casolare has over your freezer is homemade everything, customization (diners can go for sausage, pepperoni, or plain), and the smoky kiss of a wood-burning pizza oven. Also less high-fructose corn syrup and “mechanically separated chicken,” which are both apparently ingredients in pepperoni Bagel Bites. Happy eating!
Anna Spiegel covers the dining and drinking scene in her native DC. Prior to joining Washingtonian in 2010, she attended the French Culinary Institute and Columbia University’s MFA program in New York, and held various cooking and writing positions in NYC and in St. John, US Virgin Islands.
