Pizza on Spokane's South Hill
Ninety acres of park, hundred-year-old trees, and a neighborhood built for walking to dinner.
The South Hill isn't a neighborhood. It's the whole slope south of downtown, and it's really a cluster of them: Cliff-Cannon at the bottom of the grade, Manito and Cannon Hill in the middle, then Comstock, Rockwood, Lincoln Heights further out. People who live here say "the South Hill" and then immediately specify.
What they have in common is the thing you notice first, which is the trees. Much of the hill was planted a century ago and never cleared, so the residential blocks run under full canopy. In October it's the best few weeks in the city.
What's actually up here
The anchor is Manito Park, ninety acres at 17th and Grand, with a conservatory, a rose garden, a formal garden and a Japanese garden inside it. It functions as the hill's back yard. Cannon Hill Park, smaller, with the pond, does the same job a few blocks over.
The housing is old and varied in a way that's unusual for the West. Craftsman bungalows and Arts and Crafts houses, Colonial Revivals, some genuine Victorians near the bottom of the hill, and then a band of fifties ramblers where the development pushed south. Streets wander instead of gridding cleanly.
The commercial parts are short. There's no mile of frontage up here, just a handful of small strips where a few blocks of shops and restaurants cluster and then housing resumes. The Perry District is the most walkable of them and the one people name when they're describing the hill to someone from out of town. Thursday evenings in summer, the market runs there.
That pattern of small, scattered, locally owned commercial pockets is most of the hill's character. It's a part of Spokane where a business is somewhere you walk to rather than somewhere you pass.
Why it suits a one-oven kitchen
A pizzeria with six ovens and a fleet of drivers needs traffic. It wants a road with a thousand cars on it at dinner time, because the economics run on volume.
We have one stone oven and a fixed number of pies in a night. The economics run on the opposite thing: a small number of people who decided in advance they wanted this specific pizza. A quiet residential slope is a problem for the first kind of business and completely fine for the second.
It also buys us the thing that actually matters, which is time. The dough ferments cold for a day or more. Nothing's par-baked and nothing is held warm. Your pies go into the oven a few minutes before you turn up, which is only possible because the night's count is known in advance.
The practical upshot for anyone reading this from elsewhere in Spokane: it's a short drive from most of the city, and a pizza handles ten or fifteen minutes in a box perfectly well. Pickup details come through with the order confirmation.
Cooking up here
If you live on the hill, two local conditions are worth knowing about.
The air is dry. Spokane runs about 16 and a half inches of precipitation a year and summer humidity in the high thirties, so a dough ball left uncovered skins over fast. Keep it covered at every stage and run your hydration a percent or two high in summer. This is the single most useful thing to know about baking here and it costs nothing.
The season is short, about 155 frost-free days. That's what makes a South Hill garden an exercise in timing, and it's the same constraint a seasonal menu runs on. We wrote the calendar out in what Spokane grows if you want the month-by-month version.
Plenty of houses up here also have an oven worth using. If you want to start, pizza basics covers what makes the difference, and the overnight pizza dough is the recipe to try first. We publish all of them, which is a strange thing for a pizza shop to do. The recipe was never the hard part. The oven and the repetition are.
What we make
Small batches, stone-baked, long cold-fermented dough. Wednesday through Saturday, and not every week identical, which is where the name came from.
A margherita stays on, because a shop that can't make a plain margherita has no business making anything else. The rest moves with what's growing. February runs toward brassicas and citrus and produces things like a white pizza with kale and Meyer lemon. When tomatoes aren't the answer, a garlic olive oil house pie usually is.
The current menu is the live list, and the ordering page shows which days and times are open. If you want to know when something unusual is coming out of the oven, that goes up on Instagram first.