Pizza Loves Emily

Pizza Loves Emily, Brooklyn: The Verdict

Ranked #20 on Opinionated About Dining's Cheap Eats in North America for 2025 (up from #24 in 2024), Pizza Loves Emily at 919 Fulton Street in Crown Heights earns its place on that list. If you want seriously considered pizza in Brooklyn without the price tag of a tasting menu evening, this is a strong answer. Booking is easy, the hours are practical, and the OAD ranking gives you a verifiable benchmark that this is not just a neighborhood default.

Chef Matt Hyland's operation has built a consistent track record across three consecutive years of OAD Cheap Eats recognition, moving upward each cycle. That trajectory matters when you're deciding whether to make the trip from Manhattan or plan a return visit from within Brooklyn. This is a place that is getting better, not coasting.

Planning Your Visits: A Multi-Visit Strategy

Pizza Loves Emily rewards returning. If you are visiting Crown Heights for the first time, treat the initial dinner as a benchmark run: go Tuesday through Thursday when the room is less pressured (dinner runs 5–9 pm on those nights), order broadly across the menu, and establish your baseline. The goal is to understand what Hyland's kitchen does well before you start making requests.

A second visit should be a weekend lunch. Saturday and Sunday lunch service runs 12–3:30 pm, and the pacing is different from dinner. Weekend lunch at a pizzeria of this caliber is often where you get the most attentive table experience, since the evening rush hasn't begun and the kitchen is fresh. It's also, practically, when you can linger without feeling the pressure of a fully booked dinner room behind you.

A third visit, if you're building this into a broader Brooklyn dining rotation, pairs well with the neighborhood. Crown Heights has developed enough around Fulton Street that you can extend the evening. For context on what else the borough offers, see our full New York City restaurants guide.

Is It Worth the Trip?

Against Brooklyn pizza peers, Pizza Loves Emily holds a different position than Leading Pizza (more old-school, Williamsburg-anchored) or Artichoke Basille's (slice-focused, late-night). Hyland's spot is more deliberate, the kind of place where you sit down and commit to a meal rather than grab and go. For a full sit-down pizza dinner in Brooklyn, it competes directly with Angelo's Coal Oven Pizza and Don Antonio, though those skew toward different style profiles. Denino's Pizzeria & Tavern is the better call if you want a tavern atmosphere over a more focused pizzeria setting.

For a special occasion at this price tier, Pizza Loves Emily works better than you might expect. It's not a white-tablecloth environment, but a well-chosen pizza dinner with considered ordering can read as celebratory without the formality or cost of a $300-per-head tasting menu. Google reviewers back this up with a 4.4 across 1,756 ratings, which is a meaningful sample size at a venue of this type.

Outside New York, if you're benchmarking regional pizza programs, Ken's Artisan Pizza in Portland and 800 Degrees Pizza in Los Angeles occupy similar positions in their respective cities: serious pizza, accessible price points, repeat-visit menus. Pizza Loves Emily is in that tier nationally, which the OAD ranking confirms.

How It Compares