All you need to know about Firecracker Pizza & Beer, opening March 21 in the Grove

You've seen the preachy mural; now eat some pizza and drink some beer.

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“Maybe we got a little ahead of ourselves by putting up that bold mural so early in the project,” confesses Chip Schloss, owner of Firecracker Pizza & Beer. “The perception was that we’d be opening soon, but the reality was that the inside was nowhere near ready. We knew that a pizza place was eventually going to open in the Grove, and we used the mural as a place marker, to stake our claim, as it were.”

It worked.

A week ago Schloss let the Black Cat out of the bag by distributing a slick package of marketing materials to the food scribes. It announced an opening date of 3-2-1, as in a March 21 blastoff. Here's the rundown.

The pizza:

The focus remains pretty much what it was when SLM announced Firecracker's arrival a little over a year ago: Rectangular pizzas cooked in deck (not wood-burning) ovens and served on quarter-, half-, and full-size aluminum sheet pans. (If anyone’s keeping score, Firecracker’s 18 X 26” XXL pizza is a monster, the third biggest in town after the 30-incher at Mr. X Pizza and the 28-inch Pointersaurus at Pointer’s Pizza.)

The crust is homemade and thin (“but not Imo’s thin,” according to exec chef Doug Weerts, an alum of Pi Pizzeria). It's par-baked until browned on both sides, topped, and then baked for an additional three minutes. The finished product has the crisp of a cracker but with some residual chew (Schloss calls it “sturdy, but not too filling”). A mild red chili oil brushed onto the crust edge lends “a reddish, firecracker color.”

Toppings and topping combinations deserve kudos as well, led by a number of different relishes and even a mint chutney. The pepperoni, sausage, chorizo, and turkey pastrami are all made in house.

“We weren’t aiming for a specific style pizza,” Schloss says, “but trying to find an undiscovered sweet spot.” They succeeded. There’s no other pizza like this in St. Louis.

The opening menu includes nine specialty pizzas as well as two pies of the month, the Beer Forward (made with brewmaster ingredients, in sync with the seasonal beers) and the Rock It Forward (a rock-inspired pizza with a portion of the sales donated to the local chapter of School of Rock).

Although the word Firecracker might suggest hot and spicy food, Schloss chose to keep spice levels moderate to accommodate all palates, letting the heatheads customize with 66 hot sauces and a variety of “after-the-bake shakes.”

The pizza oven is unusual as well. Schloss attended the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas just to find the right oven. He selected an electric model made in Sweden: “Close the oven door and it feels as solid as a Volvo.” He adds that it’s also “the only widely-distributed oven in Italy that’s not made in Italy” and bakes as hot as a wood-burning oven (900+ degrees) without using wood, so it’s very energy-efficient.

The rest of the menu:  

The Firecracker-themed salads and appetizers (Whistlin’ Kitty Chaser, Sizzlin’ Whisker Biscuits) come from a scene in the 2001 movie Joe Dirt. The culinary approach veers from the norm: smoked boneless chicken thighs instead of chicken wings, thrice-baked potatoes instead of French fries, meatballs stuffed with blue cheese and cherry pepper relish, and Boom Sticks, hand-held, rolled-up pizzas “about the size of a stick of dynamite.”

One of the more intriguing appetizers, Zippity Do Das (pictured below) are another Joe Dirt reference, a vegan spin on Italian ingredients, with “steaks” of eggplant, zucchini, and portabella topped with garlic-tossed spaghetti squash and firecracker sauce.

Desserts include a habanero honey chocolate-chip cookie and a gluten-free rendition of Apple Betty made with teff flour (the same Ethiopian grain used to make injera bread).

The décor:

The 72-seat room (40 seats plus 32 barstools) blends high tech, low tech, and Japanese tech. Industrial-look fans spin above 20 identical tables, butcher-block deuces from famed wood craftsman John Boos. Medium-density fiberboard is painted to resemble black steel and sealed-shiny particle board is prevalent, and pine planks are finished using Shou Sugi Ban, an ancient Japanese ­technique for finishing wood by charring it with fire. Paradoxically, the heat renders the wood fireproof, waterproof, and resistant to rot.

The soundtrack at Firecracker comes via a selection of vinyl records supplied by Music Record Shop (now located at the ZACK) and curated by Schloss, who’s always eager to “drop the needle on some vinyl.”

In a few months, a tree-shaded biergarten will appear in an existing parking lot outside the rear door, with back shale replacing the concrete and a live bamboo wall, similar to the one at Atomic Cowboy next door (which Schloss also owns).

One of the areas where Firecracker really pops is the branding, spearheaded by TOKY. The building's colorful mural (see time-lapse here), earned the company an Addy Award nomination. The menu and box design are edgy, whimsical, and peppered by catchy sayings such as “Let’s bang,” “Hold in hand and point at mouth,” and  “We don’t say yes to life—we say F*CK YEAH!”

Family style it ain’t. “We want young adults, millennials, mom and dad on date night,” Schloss explains. “We’re not a ‘bright lights, trash on the floor, stand in line with your kids and order your $9 pizza’ kind of place. We want people to have a little fun as grown-ups. Our goal is to deliver table-service experience but at a fast-casual pace.”

The beverages:

At the bar, the 66 plain-handled taps are placed discreetly below the slate-look concrete bartop, instead of making the usual dizzying display on the back bar. Firecracker carries a limited number of spirits (45 bottles), also hidden from view. The lack of back-bar clutter is a welcome change.

Beer choices will be listed on old school beer placards hanging from the perforated-metal ceiling; Schloss wanted “a retro, lo-fi counter to the digital menus you see everywhere.”

Firecracker plans to use Coke products instead of the trendy pure cane sugar sodas. Schloss anticipates that a lot of the soft drinks will be used as mixers, and says “experience has shown that Jack-and-Coke drinkers prefer good ol’ Coke to the fancier options.”  

Tony Saputo, owner of Saputo Libations and a local lord of mixology, has assembled a menu of eight beer-forward cocktails. But instead of simply adding or floating a beer, as others do, he has created more intense reductions using local beers and a simple syrup made from spent grains. The Hopical Storm, for example, is made with aromatic gin, 4 Hands Incarnation IPA, ginger liqueur, grapefruit, lime, spent grain syrup, and bitters. “The grains tend to you on the back end,” Saputo explains, alluding to the obvious pairing with a crusty pizza.

Beverage director and certified cicerone Corey Moszer says that in the spring, a different local brewery will lead a weekly beer class, filling the vacancy left by the renowned beer school at Cicero’s, which shuttered last June.

Schloss sums up his new endeavor numerically: “We never wanted to have the most taps in town, just enough to tell the history of beer as well as cover every style, and that number for us was 66. We have 66 hot sauces. We’re located on old route 66. Our phone number is 314-534-3666… it’s a very six-y joint.”

Boom!

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Firecracker Pizza & Beer

4130 Manchester, St Louis, Missouri 63110

314-289-2666

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Hours: Mon-Sat: 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m.; Sun: 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 a.m

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