Regional favorite gets a glow up with rich vodka sauce and fresh mozzarella
With four locations, Brooklyn Square Pizza is known for its upside down square pies. The owner, Brooklyn native Peter Grippo, says he brings the Avenue U pizza of his youth to New Jersey.
“It’s like a pillow,” Grippo says, adding that he doesn’t par bake his square pies. “It’s crunchy, it’s fluffy, it’s fresh. It’s really good.”
Brooklyn Style in New Jersey
While Brooklyn Square Pizza offers round pies, the four-sided pan pizzas are the most popular – as the name suggests – with Grippo calling the Upside Down Square Pizza his most-ordered menu item. He calls the thick, pan pizzas “squares,” adding: “I’m not Sicilian … so I don’t call any of my pizza Sicilian.”
Making squares in Grippo’s style involves mixing dough from unbromated, unbleached flour, cold fermenting it for 24 hours, then letting the dough warm up to become workable again. The pizza dough then is stretched into a square pan, proofed and refrigerated until show time.
“It’s a long process to make the dough. That’s why you let the yeast do its action, let it rise so it gets soft and you can work it,” he says. “When we’re ready to bake it, we just take it out of the fridge, cheese it, sauce it and cook it,” he tells Pizza Today, adding that each pizza is cooked to order and not par baked.
As with many Grandma-style pies, cheese is applied first on upside down pizzas, followed by sauce. Brooklyn Square Pizza buys loaves of fresh mozzarella and slices them in-house. The fresh cheese slices are laid down on top of the dough and covered in house-made tomato sauce. Finally, the pizza is topped with a layer of imported Pecorino Romano.
“The cheese melts onto the bread and the sauce on top,” Grippo says of layering the cheese under the sauce. “It doesn’t burn the cheese; the cheese has time to cook underneath the sauce without crisping.”
A Vodka Cocktail
If the Upside Down Square is the No. 1 pizza at Brooklyn Square Pizza, the Vodka Upside Down Square is No. 2. The pie is much the same, but the house-made sauce is put together using Italian tomatoes, heavy cream, onions, a little butter and Tito’s vodka. Grippo says each of his locations make new vodka sauce every day.
He warns that newbies to vodka sauce “have to know how long to bake it so it doesn’t curdle” when the cream is exposed to acidic tomato sauce and high heat. Similarly, the amount of sauce to use on top of the cheese layer without it becoming a sloppy mess is something Grippo has refined over decades of pizza making.
“It’s just an old-school recipe we’ve been doing for years,” he says.
New Jersey Pizza in Florida
A Venn diagram of Grippo and Phil Solorzano would overlap neatly in one key area: the upside down vodka pizza. Finding an upside down slice outside of the New York-New Jersey area is a challenge – and save the occasional limited-time offer, most fans of the style are out of luck west of the Mississippi.
A third-generation pizzamaker and New Jersey native himself, Solorzano also aims to bring the pizza of his youth to a new audience – in his case, to Florida. Solorzano is the owner and licensor of Solorzano’s Pizzerias, which operates a headquarters at Solorzanos Pizzeria and Poolside Bistro in Orlando.
“I make the regular, old-school Jersey-New York pizzas – the thin crust – but then I also do Sicilian pizzas, the square Sicilians,” he says. “I’ve got the round Sicilians, which is the thicker dough, and I do that with the upside-down vodka.”
On Solorzano’s Pizzerias’ menu, the pie is called Phil’s Famous Upside Down Vodka Sauce Pizza. And while many upside down pies are served as-is, Solorzano often recommends adding fried chicken or pepperoni.
The pizza maker lets his dough ferment for about 36 hours. Depending on the season, some of his shops will make dough twice per day. Upside down pizzas are a hit with Salorzano’s audience, making up 20%-25% of total pizza sales.
“The way that the sauce is on the top … the crust cooks differently,” he says, adding that the sauce can appear to have cooked off in the oven, so he also uses fresh mozzarella atop of most of his upside down pizzas and then adds fresh basil post-bake.
Solorzano’s “Lambo Pizza” is an upside down named after the Italian flag, as it rotates stripes of pesto, vodka sauce and marinara.
A New Concept
Most of Solorzano’s pizzerias operate out of shopping mall locations formerly housed by Sbarro. “I go into these dying malls and put my food in there. And the next thing you know, people are coming to the mall and buying full pizzas,” he says, adding that his third-party delivery business has ramped up as people have become more familiar with the concept, which launched in early 2025 and already has eight locations.
Just as Solorzano is introducing a new audience to upside downs in Florida, Grippo believes Brooklyn Square Pizza was one of the first New Jersey pizzerias to offer the style.
“When you’re biting into it, you get a full flavor of everything,” he says, “dough, sauce and cheese.”
KATE LAVIN is Senior Editor at Pizza Today.
