V&Co Pizzeria

If your pizza standards were set somewhere north of Jersey, point the car at Fruitville Commons. V&Co Pizzeria opened there in July in the former Irma’s Tacos space — the latest from Tommy Villani’s OTW Restaurant Group, the team behind Villani & Co. steakhouse and the original Irma’s in Wellen Park. The room reads neighborhood joint in the best way: exposed brick, blue tin chairs, ruby-red plastic tumblers.

What sets it apart is the kitchen’s stubbornness. Executive chef Mike Leopold runs a scratch pantry with barely any freezer space — the Italian sausage is made in-house, cooked batch by batch, and crumbled over the pies, and every other topping gets the same treatment. His line on shortcuts: it takes just as much energy to do it the wrong way, so do it the right way.

Start with the garlic knots — shiny, buttered, warm — then get the carnivore: pepperoni, sausage, bacon, ham, and meatball crowding a blistered golden crust. Not in pizza mode? The calzone has seasoned ricotta with mushrooms and fennel-flecked sausage, and the meatball parm hero arrives on a crackled roll with ketchup and fries on the side, exactly like it should.

V&Co Pizzeria (3080 Fruitville Commons Blvd).