The best pizza in Colorado is in Longmont. No, really.
On today's episode we find out how the East Boulder County town ended up with three of the best pizza restaurants in the state just blocks apart from each other. The Colorado Pizza Festival comes to Longmont on September 5. With the fanfare, the city is ready to claim its title as the Pizza Capital of Colorado.
What it really comes down to though is it's fanatically passionate residents and a city eager to become a can't-miss destination in Colorado.
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SPEAKER_03
The Peak to Peak loves its pizza. It's maybe one of its best kept secrets. Between Crosscut in Netherland, Toss in Rollinsville, and Antonio's in Estes Park, we've got a pretty legitimate pizza scene. And I feel like I have a little bit of authority on the subject. I grew up eating some of the best pizza in the country in New Haven, Connecticut. But where is the best pizza in Colorado? Where is our New Haven? This is the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Down the hill in East Boulder County, Longmont is making a very strong case for Colorado's pizza capital. Three award-winning pizzarias share a couple of blocks on Main Street. And the time it takes to eat a slice of pizza, you can walk from Rosalie's to Urban Field and Antonio's. The shops have gotten some press, too. Westward, Citicast, even the Denver Post have all speculated that Longmont might have Colorado's best pizza. But of all places, why Longmont? I've spent the last month trying to find an answer to this. And I think I got to the bottom of it. The issue is also our fall arts preview for the Peak to Peak and Boulder County. It's packed with music, events, gallery shows, and so much more to fill your schedule while we wait patiently for that fall air to roll in. One big event you won't want to miss happens this weekend. The inaugural Colorado Pizza Festival is kicking off in Longmont. When I came across this, I knew that Longmont's pizza scene deserved a closer look. So I reached out to a much more seasoned pizza authority than myself.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, not to be boastful, but I think I'm Colorado's number one pizza journalist. I would agree. Not that there's a lot of people gunning for that title, but I I have, you know, because it is a personal passion, spent a lot of time chasing stories and eating pizza all over this state.
SPEAKER_03
I gotta say, this is a bit of an understatement. Paul Caroli spent years investigating what so-called Colorado style pizza is and how Bojo's famed slogan created a myth about the state's regional style. He's covered the topic extensively and still finds time to talk pies at CityCast Denver, where he's the executive producer. Paul was the first person that came to mind when I fell down my own pizza rabbit hole.
SPEAKER_02
I know that you're probably a little bit more familiar with pizza in Denver, but I wanted to know from your perspective, is the hype real for Longmont pizza?
SPEAKER_00
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I I've been saying this for years, even before uh Antonio's, which is the third of like the big three in Longmont, opened up a couple years ago. That uh I mean, something special is happening. Um, and and I'm like you, like I love Longmont. Uh my in-laws live um around Longmont now. So I have been for the I'm and I moved to Colorado in 2015. So I have been eating around the city, like probably every restaurant in Longmont over the last 12 years. You know, I don't know. There hasn't been one a place that I was excited about until I ate at Rosalie's, um, which is, in my opinion, the best pizza place in Longmont and one of the best in the state, and just like truly a special place, uh, what Amy and James Ross have created there. I think for folks in the know, like you and me, we knew that Longmont was where it's at when it comes to pizza. But yeah, I mean, I was just talking to Paul Natchag, one of the co-owners of uh Urban Field. He's like, I think the primary organizer. Um, and he he was telling me it's it's been overwhelming, this whole idea. Like whenever he talks, he he was saying whenever he shares the idea and tells people that there is this festival happening, people get excited about it. It's just one of those things where like it clicks immediately, like, oh, this was absent. We need this, I cannot wait to go. And that's how I felt when I first saw it. It is a place where this great pizza is, you know, Antonio's, Urban Field, Rosalie's. But in your email, when you asked me if I would talk to you about this, you posed a question that I realized I don't actually know the answer to. Okay. Um, and I looked around and like, I don't, I don't, I couldn't find any explanation. You know, it sounds like you'll be talking to some sh chefs who can offer some more insight, but like, why Longmont? Why was Longmont the place for these people to all congregate? And so I did check in with Amy and uh James Ross from Rosalie's and Paul Nashak, like I said. And the story from Amy and James, they they opened first. Rosalie's opened in 2014. They said they used to work at left-hand brewery. Okay. And that's where they realized, I'm quoting, how strong a community Longmont was. Uh, and many of their customers there have become their customers at Rosalie's. Um, so they're like deeply rooted in northern Colorado and they love it. And then, same with Paul Nashak, same story. He was like, after Amy and James came and they really had this focus on building a community around Rosalie's, I could tell, and I'm speaking from his perspective, I could tell Longmont was a place where people love pizza and there would be interest in this. Um, but then what was interesting to me was he first went to Loveland with the pizza festival idea. And Loveland wasn't as amenable. And then he went to the city of Longmont, and they were like over the moon psyched. And he could not have said enough good things about the city of Longmont itself, um, who provided a lot of uh public funding to build out his restaurant space to allow Urban Field to open in 2022. Um, and then and then they've been just super supportive, like making all the permits easy for this festival to happen. So I think like the city of Longmont has been really aggressive um in pursuing this and creating this. So they they deserve a lot of credit as well, in addition to the the chefs who are cooking the pies themselves.
SPEAKER_03
So Longmont is obsessed with pizza. The city, the residents, the restaurant owners. But how did we get here? To the point of having three of the best pizza places in Colorado. To this obsession, each pizza maker has their own reasons. But there's a through line of deep support and intense local pride from Longmonsters that's helped the city turn into a destination in and of itself. Forget Boulder, forget Denver. Longmont is the place to be. It's part of what brought Nick Swanson and the urban field owners to open up their first location here.
SPEAKER_01
So, I mean, convenience is one, right? Like when you open up your first restaurant, you want to be as close to home as possible and also as close to the restaurant as your kind of your second home, right? But beyond that, you know, Longmont, I felt like has just been in the shadow of Boulder for so long, you know, like and hasn't gotten the respect and credibility that it deserves. Now I could sit here and easily argue that Longmont has just as good of a food scene, if not better than Boulder at this point, and more eclectic in my mind, you know? And just the sense of community in that town is unbelievable. Like people that live in Longmont are proud that they live in Longmont and they should be. I mean, that town has come so far in like the 10, 12 years I've been around. And then the people, I mean, the amount of people I bump into that are like, I'm a born and raised longmonster, I'm like, that's impressive. Like that's amazing. And they have no desire to go anywhere else. You know, like town is everything you need, you know, and it's just it's just growing and getting better as time goes on. And um, but yeah, that sense of community and just like I said, how proud people are to be from Longmont is just awesome. It it's it's infectious. It makes you want to be a part of it, you know. So it was when we found the space, it was an easy decision for us.
SPEAKER_03
Besides a love for Longmont, the big three have another thing in common. They're all from the East Coast. Swanson is from just outside Boston. James Ross at Rosalie's grew up in Pennsylvania, and Anthony D'Souza of Antonio's is a born and raised Long Islander. Whether that's a coincidence or a testament to the Northeast's own pizza obsession is up for interpretation. But there's no denying these roots are a part of what drove them to make pizza in their new Rocky Mountain homes.
SPEAKER_05
Especially 12 years in now, I think like more and more like, yeah, we're East Coast inspired, but like at the end of the day, we're Rosalies. I I've just always been kind of obsessed with with pizza, and uh it was my first cooking job um that I ever had, you know, wherever where I ever put on an apron was to be a a pizza cook. It's always just been a huge part of my life and it and then it became a part of like how I made money. And then coming out here to Colorado, um, it just never really went away because I do think that as many pizza places as there were, I didn't really think there was necessarily an overabundance of pizzerias that really spoke to me. But I didn't think I thought that there was definitely room for like another interpretation of, you know, uh Frankenstein of what is East Coast pizza. You know, it's like, you know, they talk about Philly pizza and Jersey pizza and like, you know, New Haven style and you know, Valley Forge and like on and on and on. It's like I've never really been one to turn up my nose at uh a particular style of pizza or particular pizza place, like I gotta have pizza like wherever I go, because like not to stroke my ego or or to to take notes, but just because I love it. I don't know, it's just a love for it.
SPEAKER_06
So that's that's what we Rosalies. When I I moved to town in 2011, and it's soon people started saying, Have you heard from James and Amy? Do you know James and Amy? And James and Amy had such a strong vision of what they wanted to bring to our community around fantastic pizza, but they really set the tone of these are not just places where you come and eat, you become family once you go into any of these restaurants, and they really made a whole environment from what's happening.
SPEAKER_03
That's Kimberly McKee, the executive director of Longmont's downtown development authority. Part of their goal is to attract people like Nick Swanson and James and Amy Ross to open up their restaurants in Longmont. It turns out they're pretty good at it.
SPEAKER_06
Uh back when the DDA uh we kind of wanted to become an arts and entertainment district, and kind of an anchor of that arts and entertainment district was food and food related. We know that we have wonderful historic buildings which are sometimes very hard to retrofit into restaurants. So we have a number of incentives to help people invest in their properties. Most of those are facades to make sure that the outside looked wonderful for our community, but we also invested some different tools for restaurants to invest in the inside of their building to be able to put in hoods and upgrade ADA bathrooms and do whatever it takes to kind of make those uh spaces into these wonderful restaurants. All three of these restaurants were able to get our incentives to open up, and so that's a very helpful tool that we can have when businesses are opening. We really understood uh from talking to people that wanted to do it, the costs and some of the hiccups. And so we were able to invest in those. And I think it's really important to get business owners the tools that they can to preserve and property owners to preserve these buildings because they're really, really important to our environment.
SPEAKER_03
And so there are thousands of dollars available to folks looking to set up shop in downtown Longmont. Urban Field got $25,000 from the DDA to help convert the old butterball turkey plant into their glossy new pizzeria. Part of a $50,000 grant at Antonio's helped paint a giant Italian flag on the brick face of their main street shop. D'SUSA says that flag has been a beacon to hungry visitors, bringing in a diverse group of customers that are a big reason why he brought Antonio's from Estes to Longmont in the first place.
SPEAKER_04
The the first and foremost reason is I always wanted to be in a city. Like Denver. The idea was, you know, some population, certain grit. I wanted to be where there was uh, you know, lively, uh a livelihood, if you will, life, all walks of life, because that's where I come from. You know, when I moved here, what I found was that the there was a very homogeneous population, and it wasn't what I was used to. You know, I was used to being around people from every background, whether they're hard, soft, rich, poor, whatever. You you meet everybody in a few hours on Long Island because you just walk into a store and you and you can bump into anyone. So coming here it was it was really a different, um, it was really a different world. So I found it a little bit difficult to assimilate into Colorado initially. But then I grabbed hold of it and said, you know what, there's people of every walk of life here. So if I just put up the flag, people come. And it's really wild how how many New Yorkers will come into that place and say, I'm from wherever, or go come from Connecticut, Rhode Island, doesn't matter. I'm from the East Coast, is the prevailing statement when people walk in there. And that that actually showed me that the idea was right, that if I was to put up the the flag, somebody would come. And they do.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, yeah. And I mean it it sounds like it was almost sort of like serendipitous that Walmart ended up with these three like really, really good pizza places. Um I agree. I I've I've talked to uh Rosalies and Urban Field, and they all have their own reasons for opening up a place in Longmont right there on Main Street, but it's just kind of happened to end up in a way where you guys are, you know, sharing a sidewalk. And it's a phenomenal, phenomenal pizza town now.
SPEAKER_04
I I would agree. So I did think of that. When when I saw the two of them there, I had, of course, eaten their pizza many times. And I felt like, all right, you know, there's an old saying, most people don't understand the saying, but it's that flies like other flies. If you have ever seen one of those fly traps um where there's, you know, 200 flies sitting on it, you wonder, like after the 50th, why didn't anybody learn? Why didn't any of these flies learn? I shouldn't land there, I'm gonna die too. But what happens is if you see a crowd, people tend to gravitate towards a crowd. They just don't know why. They did they wander in, they're like, oh, that place is full, it must be good. That's the saying that you hear all the time. And coming from Long Island, it wasn't uncommon to have four different pizzerias on four corners across the street from each other. What it does is make it a Mecca. And you what you'll see is that people will come into my place for this, go to Rosalie's for that, or go to Urban Field for this, or go down the street to SmackDaddy and pick up a, you know, a Detroit that they want, whatever it might be. And now you give people more reason to come downtown. So you're gonna get even families that fight about whose pizza is better. No, I like this one. No, I like that one. The bottom line is they're all good. It's just a matter of what you personally prefer. It doesn't mean that your single, your single idea that this pizza is better carries any weight, because it doesn't. What carries weight is when people come consistently and buy your food. So when you see the same face over and over, you know that at that point you have a customer and they prefer whatever the thing is that they're buying. It could even be a bagel, doesn't matter. The whole point is that people will go to an area where there are multiple pizzerias, taco places, whatever it might be that we're talking about, um, they'll go there just because they have selection. And if one's full, they can go to the one down the street and grab whatever it is that they want. So it's kind of like you don't strike out um when you go to a town that has multiple pizzerias, there's always something.
SPEAKER_03
The other pizzaiolas in town share that sentiment. Having options is good, they said. It's not a deterrent to opening up a restaurant. So far, it's been enough to put Longmont on the map as the Colorado destination for pizza.
SPEAKER_02
Do you consider Longmont Colorado's pizza capital? That's a loaded question right there. It is, it is.
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I would say when you look at what we have in such a short like distance, I would say, yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely a destination spot in Colorado now, you know, and it's right up there with I mean any other town in in this state for sure. You know, I mean, we have we have so much good pizza and good food in such a short radius or small radius, it's it's crazy these days. It's awesome.
SPEAKER_04
When you think about it, now New Haven's got like a hundred years, downtown Manhattan, a hundred years. Well, we don't have that. So what we've got to do is just keep attracting talent. And if anyone says, let's go have pizza, we want them to think at the same time. We gotta go Longmont.
SPEAKER_03
The Colorado Pizza Festival kicks off Saturday, September 5th in downtown Longmont. You can still get tickets starting at $20 at Colorado PizzaFestival.com. But don't worry if you missed it. Rosalie's, Urbanfield, and Antonio's aren't going anywhere. It is well worth the trip to grab a pie at any of these places. As a thin crust truther myself, I can say Urban Field's thick Detroit style knocked the coastal elitism straight out of my soul. It's pretty damn good. Huge thanks to Nick Swanson, Anthony D'Souza, James Ross, Kimberly McKee, and Paul Caroli for helping me report this story, and to all the listeners out there who are just as obsessed with pizza as I am. You can read the full story at cariboucurrent.com, or in our September edition, which is out on news racks across the Peak to Peak and all over Boulder County today. If you liked today's episode, share it around with whoever likes pizza, I guess. I mean, who doesn't like pizza? As always, you can like and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts to get peak to peak news and stories like this the moment we hit the airwaves. Once again, this is the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. See you then.
