A restaurant serving brick oven Neapolitan pizza? In Philadelphia? Called Nomad Pizza? This I had to try! If not for the pizza then for the creative name of the restaurant.
Nomad pizza is tucked away right off of South street in a two story building. The first floor of the restaurant being the smaller of the two consisted of the large brick oven, counter top space and a few tables. The side stairs take you upstairs to a much more spacious dining room where a communal dining table lines the middle of the restaurant with separate seating lining the walls. The large screen at one end is used for their movie nights. 
The menu consists of some delicious locally sourced salads and pizzas (see menu). I also learned that Tom Grim, co-owner of Nomad Pizza and 14 of his staff members had just returned from Rome where I assume they ate a lot of Roman pizza. I’m sure they have new fresh off the boat Italian tricks to implement into their dishes. As for our meal, we started off with a roasted root salad.
It was simply divine. Pieces of local organic wood fire roasted beets and carrots, atop a bed of garlic sauteed pea greens, topped with balsamic reduction and finished with garlic chive chevre. The root vegetables tasted earthy and fresh like they were just picked out of a garden out back.
Next, we had the margherita ($12), arugula con proscuitto ($18) and truffle pecorino ($18) pizzas. A lot can be said about a pizza shop when tasting their margherita. It’s the simplest pizza on the menu but often times the tastiest. It begins with the dough- a good pizza dough is the basis for a good pizza. The dough at Nomad Pizza was the perfect dough: perfectly chewy, savory and the right amount of crispy with just the right number of char spots lining the crust.
The margherita could have had more tomato paste as despite the generous portion of mozzarella cheese it was a bit on the dry side. As for the other toppings there was a wide range of offerings on the menu. My favorite for the evening however, had to be the truffle pecorino. However, eyeing our neighbor’s pizza there seem to be many other delicious varieties that I have yet to try.
The arugula con prosciutto consisted of arugula greens topped with prosciutto di parma. It was delicious despite it also being on the drier side.
If you like the taste of truffle oil, you will really enjoy the truffle pecorino pizza. The chewy pizza dough was topped with mozzarella di bufala, shiitake mushrooms, garlic, fresh egg, with tartufo and truffle oil. The egg was blended on the pizza table-side.
While completely full after our fabulous meal, the site of a nutella pizza on the menu was too good to resist. And so of course we had to try it. It was the same pizza dough slapped with generous amounts of chocolaty nutella, crunchy hazelnuts and strawberry (instead of banana as requested). One thing that we all noticed was the aftertaste of garlic. It ruined the taste a bit…but not enough to outweigh eating all that nutella.
Overall, we all really enjoyed our meal at Nomad Pizza and will definitely be going back for their next movie night
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