By Charlie Pogacar
In 2022, Josiah Bartlett found himself at a crossroads. He’d spent over a year tirelessly building his pop-up brand, Wizard Hat Pizza, into a known quantity. Word had traveled around Prospect Lefferts Garden, a residential Brooklyn neighborhood, that Wizard Hat was making some of the best pizza in the city. You could grab a slice at Anything, a neighborhood bar, several days a week.
Bartlett was then blindsided when the bar’s owners let him know they were going to roll out their own pizza concept. A job there, they told him, was his. But taking it would mean he wouldn’t be able to spend time building up his first love, Wizard Hat Pizza. Maybe somebody else would have given up and taken the job and the promise of security—but that isn’t how Bartlett rolls.
“I knew that if I went that route, I’d be giving up on what I’d built,” Bartlett said. “And I wasn’t willing to do that.”
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To make matters more complex, Bartlett was about to get written up in a glowing Pete Wells’ review of the city’s pop-up scene in The New York Times. This would provide a great deal of buzz for Wizard Hat, but what if the story was directing foot traffic to a bar that was suddenly serving somebody else’s pizza?
Despite Wizard Hat’s growing reputation and popularity, Bartlett was in a tough spot. He needed to quickly find a space to sell his pizza, and he didn’t have the money stashed for a brick-and-mortar location nor, as he joked, did he have wealthy friends. And, because Wizard Hat had good name recognition in the Prospects Lefferts Garden neighborhood, he wanted to find that space locally rather than start all over in some other part of the city.
In a serendipitous turn of events, a bakery space was vacated a couple of blocks down the street from Anything. It didn’t have ventilation or much equipment to speak of—and it wasn’t like Bartlett could erect signage—but it would do the trick for a determined pizzaiolo in a jam.
That is how, for two years, Bartlett came to serve pizza out of a nondescript building in an arrangement he referred to as “somewhere in between a pop-up and a residency.” Once opened, Bartlett would simply place a chalkboard sign outside and business would roll in. Because the unconventional setup had been secured in time, Wells’s review of Wizard Hat pointed folks in the right direction. A growing number of diners fell in love with Wizard Hat and Bartlett’s unique brand of New York-style pizza, featuring its signature crispy, crunchy crust.
“One of the hardest questions I’ve gotten is how I would describe my pizza,” Bartlett said. “But I think, at this point, I can finally do it: It’s definitely heavily New York-inspired in style, with its shape and all of that, but we also use a wider variety of cheeses.”
One such cheese is Pecorino Romano, which Bartlett has always used to finish his Cheese pizza, among others. The Pecorino left at least one high-profile customer flummoxed—in a One Bite Review by Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder rated Wizard Hat a 7.9, commenting on the quality and flavor of the dough, but also noting much he didn’t care for the “Parmesan” cheese. Bartlett, moving in and out of the pizzeria to fulfill orders as the review was in progress, helpfully corrected Portnoy—the cheese in question was Pecorino Romano. The influencer moved on to try Bartlett’s Tomato Pie, rating it an 8.2. (To this day, Bartlett said, Wizard Hat receives an order or two per week asking for a Cheese pizza “without the Pecorino”).
Another Hallmark of Bartlett’s pizza is the generous amount of fresh basil he finishes many of his pies with. He estimated he goes through 12 to 16 pounds of basil per week and has actually had to cut back the amount of basil he uses on each pie. Still, when he informally polls his regular customers as to whether his pizza tastes better with or without the basil, the answer is unanimous: “They all say it’s much, much better with it,” Bartlett said.
One of the most unique aspects of Wizard Hat Pizza—and further evidence that Bartlett is confident in his singular vision for the brand—is that he’s never spent a dime on advertising. Instead, his strategy has been to make incredibly good pizza and let word travel. The business’s growth has been completely organic, something that’s only been possible because of his ability to find thrifty ways to keep overhead down. Like doing the pop-ups at the bar. Or moving into the bakery space.
“I have been in pretty safe, supportive spaces,” Bartlett said, “to start creating my product without a ton of overhead pressure from investors or bills to pay and stuff like that. Looking back at my first few pop-ups at [Anything], we may have sold like three pizzas. Word just steadily built.”
More recently, things changed at Anything, the bar Wizard Hat first called home. The pizza concept they’d tried to implement didn’t work out, and there was an opportunity for Bartlett to move back in with a bit more space for dine-in visitors. It was closer to the arrangement he’d been hoping for two years earlier, so he leapt at the opportunity. “I never in a million years thought I’d be back at Anything making pizza,” Bartlett said. “But we are.”
For Bartlett, it didn’t feel like he’d won or proven somebody wrong. He called it a minor miracle that Wizard Hat Pizza has been in continuous operation for over three years now, and felt like he’d stuck to his guns and made the right decision to move down the block.
“I don’t know if I got any satisfaction out of it, but it for sure made me more sure of the decisions I had made,” Bartlett said. “I was just like, wow, I’m so glad I trusted my gut and spent the past couple years growing Wizard Hat.”