A First Look Inside Downtown’s New Pizza Rock Restaurant

By Scott Roeben, on August 28 2013
2 min read 2 comments
Downtown Las Vegas Las Vegas Las Vegas Bars Las Vegas Restaurants

One of the new Las Vegas restaurants we’re most looking forward to opening is Pizza Rock, soon to be a tasty addition to the dining options at Downtown Third.

We love when a plan comes together. Especially if there's pizza involved.
We love when a plan comes together. Especially if there’s pizza involved.

There’s a lot of pizza we like downtown, but not a lot we love, so we have our fingers crossed with Pizza Rock.

If you can create a cool logo for your restaurant, you're half way home.
In the restaurant business, if you can find a decent graphic designer, you’re half way home.

We pressed our camera up against the new restaurant’s windows to get a first peek inside this new downtown pizza place.

The first thing to pique our interest? The bar, of course.
The first thing to pique our interest? The bar, of course.

Pizza Rock is still very much under construction, but it’s expected to open in the late summer of 2013. Which we thought we’re already in, but what do we know?

You can visit the restaurant’s official, and pretty much useless, Web site, to sign up for an e-mail newsletter. We did.

We're big fans of these decorative flourishes on the ceiling. Funky, with playing card symbols.
We’re big fans of these decorative flourishes on the ceiling. Funky, with playing card symbols. And possibly lightning.

Apparently, one of the big draws of Pizza Rock will be its “celebrity chef,” Tony Gemignani. Have you heard of him? Us neither, which is why many “celebrity chefs” in Las Vegas have “quotation marks around them.”

That said, Gemignani seems to have racked up a number of notable accomplishments in the pizza world, several of which are touted on the sign outside Pizza Rock.

We'll try a pizza from a world champion any day of the week.
We’ll try a pizza from a world champion any day of the week.

If you’re the first American to ever win the World Pizza Cup competition in Naples, Italy, you’re cool with us. (Naples tourism tagline: “Naples. Our garbage collectors have been on strike since the mid-1970s.)

Pizza Rock has a sister location, in Sacramento, California. Pizza Rock seems like it will be a good fit for the Las Vegas restaurant scene, because they have already mastered the art of “news release fluffery.”

Here’s a sample: “Utilizing fresh organic local ingredients to create savory dessert pizzas and sensational menu items, focusing on being totally unique and bold, using interesting combinations that have never been done before, as well as ‘over the top’ presentations.” We’re also pretty sure that isn’t a sentence. But copywriting has never been how we measure how good a restaurant is!

There's a chance we're sharing a photo of the same thing over and over, framed differently.
There’s a chance we’re sharing a photo of the same thing over and over, just framed differently. You’ll live.

Feel free to check out the Pizza Rock menu for its Sacramento location, as it’s likely to be what’s in store for the downtown location as well.

The menu features numerous antipasti options (Italian for “before the meal,” in other word, “appetizers”), salads, pizzas (shocker) as well as other Italian fare like stromboli, calzone and pastas. These are a few of our favorite things!

Pick up the pace, construction dudes, we're famished.
Pick up the pace, construction dudes, we’re famished.

Pizza Rock had us at “900-degree wood-fired Cirigliano Forni oven.” (Cirigliano Forni is a family-owned, brick oven manufacturer that has made pizza ovens for three generations.)

More Pizza Rock updates are sure to be on the way. If we can stop eating pizza long enough to type something.