Rocca Pizzeria has spoiled us, with Neapolitan-style pies prepared with quality ingredients and painstaking attention to detail.
Those details start with a dough made daily using the old school “biga” method, which combines double zero (00) Italian flour with sourdough starter to achieve something nutty and complex. Eased into the 900° belly of an imported Acunto pizza oven, the emerging pies are a study in rustic sophistication.
“In my travels, I had always sought out real pizza like the kind you find in Naples,” Rocca founder Ozzie Fernandez says. “There’s something magical about it. I felt like Baton Rouge had a pizza gap, and that we needed something like this.”
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Back in 2018, Fernandez, who also owns Izzo’s Illegal Burrito, Lit Pizza and Modesto Tacos Tequila Whiskey, had been toying with the idea of a Neapolitan-inspired concept. At the same time, the restaurant space briefly occupied by Goûter on Government Street became available.
“The landlord was showing it to me for another location of Lit, and a lightbulb went off,” Fernandez says. “I thought, ‘This is the right place for something different.’”
We share the story of how Rocca was born, plus some other pizza restaurant openings, in 225‘s March 2021 cover story exploring Baton Rouge’s growing and changing pizza culture. Read the rest of the cover package here.