Ancora

I have to confess that we only came here because we couldn’t get a table at the more famous place in Magazine. I’m SO glad we did.
The pizzas are inventive and true to the type we have had in Italy. In addition, the service was spectacular.

This was recommended to our party by Chef John Currence. And it did not disappoint. The pizzas were so delicious. I haven’t been to Italy myself; however, others in my party had and they believed it all of the food tasted true to the region. The house made sodas were delicious with fresh squeezed juice. I made mine «Adult» and added gin per the waiters recommendation. Also, the daiquiri was unlike anything I’ve had before. A cup of shaved ice and the. A separate cup of the rum and juice to mix to my liking. This place was outstanding. I will definitely return.

Best pizza in New Orleans, attractive, cozy setting, great drink menu, friendly service, reasonable prices. Half off many of the pizzas after 9pm is a incredible deal. Get the Bianca, the 4 cheese, and the margarita.

great specials after 9pm — salty food = good but not amazing and im too old to wait till post 9pm to eat
We ordered 4 pizzas for 5 people after 9pm when they are half off. I like the margarita pizza but most of the others had meat on one without cheese was everyone’s least fav as it was strong with the herbs and garlic. It was ok pizza but really salty for my taste and I chugged a gallon of water after eating.

After 9pm they have certain pizzas at 50%.
Not the best pizzas, I really need more cheese you know… and a more sharp tomato sauce. However their dough is very good and their drinks are on point.

Words cannot describe how absolutely amazing this place is. My husband and I had our rehearsal dinner here last weekend. The food was on point and the staff went so for above and beyond the call of duty to make our experience everything we could have dreamed of.
Many of our guests told us that the pizza was the best they’d ever had, and I regularly dream about the delicious arancini. The manager is a dream to work with, and we are so grateful for his hospitality!

A welcome break from those deep dish doofuses! Idk why we’re even eating d.d. pizza at this point when thin woodfire oven pizza is obvi way yummier and chill.
The interior of ancora is right purdy, with a generous view of the blue mosaic oven and kitchen! We ordered a margherita ($ 13) and the special, a mascarpone arugula and cappicola pie ($ 18). Imho a pizza restaurant should be able to stand by its margherita, and this one did not disappoint. The dough was fantasticc, crusts were a highlight just a little salty a little sour and lots of that smoky woodfire taste! The special felt less coherent but I’m also not so into the ~pie with greens and cured meat added post-​oven (too often the subtler flavors of the meat are lost to the cheese, dough, etc). Our service was friendly and professional and we were seated quickly! Of course there could be a server who isn’t friendly there but we didn’t meet them! Also if it were busier or a weekend maybe we wouldn’t have been seated as quickly. But as they say, c’est la vie!

Was recommended to me by a local (as Id never been to Freret St) The menu was lacking and over priced. Though the small portion of gourmet pizza held me over til I could make it back to late night at St Charlea Tavern and we got good fast service… Overall I wish I had walked on down Freret and eaten at one of the many other places available. This wouldnt be where I would recommend going to get pizza.

This entirely blew my mind! To be frank, I had sort of expected a fast food restaurant when first told about it, but the entire experience was fantastic. From the prosecco and st. germaine cocktail to the locally sourced meat sampler, the enormous arancini balls, the roasted sweet potatoes, to the buffalo mozzarella pizza, I have 0 things I would change. Perhaps come with more people so that I can try more things next time!
A great place to take the parents or go on a first date, this place is casual, yet has a very high quality appeal to their food and drinks. Two thumbs up!

The service was great. The pizza was incredible, with lots of great options. The spicy salami pizza and the marguerite pizza is delicious. I could have eaten all of the crab gnocchi, but I had to share.
The wine list is nice. And, they have some different beers, including beer, from a Louisville brewery I like; ATG.
All of their ingredients come from a region, in Italy.

I ordered Filetti add salami n rice mozzarella ball for appetizer.
Pizza dough was really good n buffalo mozzarella was good. Large size is smaller what I expect.
Rice ball was big.

The pizza is very good; I like all kinds of pizzas, and this didn’t disappoint. The flavor was great with the right amount of everything. I think when using an oven such as theirs it’s easy to «burn» the pizza. I use quotations because what I think is burnt most people won’t mind. I don’t like a lot of black crust on my dough.
The service was okay — a little slow, but the server was nice. He said we could even go look at their oven, which was made in Italy. We went on a Saturday night, and there were so many kids! I don’t really mind kids yelling and running around so much, but almost every table had a kid (s) with them.

Very solid place!
They always have a great beer selection, and they rotate it often. The cured meats are good too, and constantly improving. Honestly, I feel as though each time I go there, the restaurant has improved food wise. I wasn’t the biggest fan the first time I went there, but it gets better with every visit! Definitely try the gnocchi and the meatballs!
Also, at least last time I checked, they have happy hour from 9pm till close with $ 5 pepperoni and cheese pizzas!

This was a hard review to make, teetering between a three and a four. I bumped it up to four because the ingredients were very high quality, they had some very exciting menu items, and the ambience of the restaurant itself was lovely. Still, I probably won’t go back, which, to me, is usually something I consider when placing my reviews.
We had a puttenesca pizza, which is usually the type of pizza I really like. It was good, and our eggplant appetizer was good, but just not knock-​my-​socks-​off good.
That being said, I’m a fan of very saucy pizzas. The kind that fall apart. The pizza here just wasn’t my thing, but something not being my thing shouldn’t be the basis of a Unilocal review.
The friend I went with on this visit has been wanting to come here since forever, and he fell in love with it. He’s travelled the world and has much more sophisticated pizza taste than I do, and he would probably give Ancora five stars. He raved the entire way back to his place.
This is DEFINITELY a place you should go if you live in NOLA. I’m glad that I added it to my pizza tour of the city. Service was spot on, there were quirky little touches to the décor that I loved, and it’s in a very accessible part of the city.

I really really dig Ancora.
I’ve never actually been to the brick and mortar restaurant, but I’ve had their takeout a few times and have always been satisfied. The Filetti is my favorite pizza on the menu, but the specials are really where it’s at. My favorite was a special pizza with beets and goat cheese — delicious! We also got an order of the prosciutto-​wrapped melon, which I am always a sucker for. I will definitely be back to check out the actual restaurant and try some more menu items!

This place is 2 blocks from my house and I have to say that makes me very happy. They opened up not too long ago and have a minimalist trendy kind of industrial theme going on which seems to be increasingly popular nowadays.
The first thing that caught my eye when I walked in was their wood burning pizza oven decorated with small tiles. This made me even more excited because I know how wood fire cooking really enhances the flavor of pizza by giving the crust a slight char that makes it taste authentic.
I used to work at a small bakery back in Georgia and we had ovens that have a large door for baking entire racks of sheet pans for making things like hamburger buns, etc. and we also had a large deck oven for cooking more artisanal loaves. A few times we made pizza just to eat at work and it tastes good coming out of a commercial deck oven which is how I believe most pizzas are made but it lacks that smoky flavor that comes from the fire.
I went for dinner with a friend during their ‘happy hour’ that starts at 9 p.m. where pizzas and select cocktails are ½ price. It was a little surprised to see the place had very few people in it which always makes you wonder.
I ordered the marinara pizza, and I found it unusual that it actually did not come with cheese, you have to pay extra for that. I have never heard of a pizza with out cheese. However, it was not much and it is not a big deal I was just surprised and think it may only be that way for certain pizzas. Also, since it was ½ price even with extra for the cheese and tip it was still very affordable and an good deal for the quality.
Speaking of quality, it is one of the reasons that prompted my friend and I to try this place. They use local ingredients and are very transparent about who they get them from (check out their website) which is a thing I wish more restaurants did.
The service was friendly and the server was attentive and knowledgeable. Our pizzas arrived quickly and were pretty filling, I took a few pieces home. The pizza I ordered, the marinara, came with tomato sauce, garlic, and oregano to which I added mozzarella. The amount of toppings was spot on but I do wish that my crust had been just a tiny bit more crispy but all in all it was good.
There are two major things I really like about this place:
1) That they have a relatively small menu which to me means they are not trying too hard but care about doing a few things really well instead of a ton of things average or even below average. It also makes choosing what to order much easier and probably has the effect of streamlining communication between the kitchen and the front of house.
2) They are a local business, have a good deal during happy hour, and they tell you where they source their ingredients which is rare these days.

PROS:
Great Freret street location.
Interesting toppings and offerings.
Great happy hour prices, including a late night one that offers 4 different pizza options for $ 7 each.
Quality ingredients.
Pretty atmosphere.
CONS:
One small round of salami on each slice of pizza. Very chintzy.
Crust had mediocre flavor, and had no crisp to it at all.
Mid City Pizza remains my favorite.

Holy cow! This place is awesome!!! Cool vibes, great service, impeccable food! We accidentally stumbled into this place last weekend and it blew me away!
I used to work in Naples, Italy and the food there is so so good. This is the closest I have gotten since I moved back to the US a few years ago. They use the most amazing ingredients, if they aren’t local, then they are imported from Italy. I would recommend ordering only from their specials board. You will not be disappointed!
Some of the items on the menu do need a little bit of translation. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, the servers are really friendly and happy to explain.
The pizza is amazing. It is made on an oven that was inported from Italy. You can pay a bit more to have the real deal Italia Buffalo Mozzarella. We ordered the gnocchi and it was literally perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing. We also had the Arancini (stuffed rice & cheese balls which are coated with breadcrumbs and fried). It came served on fresh tomato sauce with a big basil leaf.
Amazing date night experience at Ancora. Will definitely return. Not the cheapest pizza place in town, but your tastebuds will thank you.

The more I think about Ancora, the more I really liked it.
I am not a pizza snob, more of a pizza slob. We tend to order Papa’s once a week and break out the Tabasco, homegrown banana peppers, and ranch, yes I defile my pizzas with a ton of ranch.
Back to Ancora… We were going to get it to go so we could marathon watch American Horror Story’s The Coven, but I begged that we stay in and eat. The space is expansive, with a great big window similar to other businesses on Freret.
We received our menus and the beer menu, were told specials were on the wall, and left to decide. We were kinda hangry, so after deciding, we’re like, «yo where’d our buddy waiter go?» but I think it was the hunger pangs slowing down time between menu receiving and ordering.
We scooped up an order of the Lardo Bruschetta, which the waiter was kind enough to let us know it wasn’t cheese since some peeps think it is. It’s strips of fatback cured with herbs. It seemed to be very very thin on our Bruschetta, but I loved the taste (though unique and kind of hard to explain) and it was great to dip the rest of our bread in the special app, Arancini Balls; fried rice and cheese balls with a marinara sauce underneath. Open these up before biting into since the cheese is like molten delicious lava.
Then on to our pizza, the Diavola. Wait till it cools just a little or your toppings may slide off. Coming out, it doesn’t look like much since it’s 12″ and a thinner pizza without being New York size (#pizzarules) but the flavor is so much more rich than what you’d expect. The salumi packs a lot of flavor in the little slices, and is just enough on each piece. Robert joked about them having ranch, but we did request red pepper flakes. The waiter (who was on point and informative after the hangry wore off) said he would bring the pepper flakes, but also suggested a chili paste that he though might go better with the flavors. This attention to complementary condiments to their menu items is a huge plus to me. We ended up not using the flakes at all and putting the chili paste on our pieces (sparingly, because it is quite spicy).
I thought this was the perfect amount of food, and well priced for what we ate. I think next time I will definitely have to complement my pizza with a glass of red wine. While I still love my Midway across the… way, these pizzas are night and day, and both equally delicious in their own right.
Diavola: Spicy Naples Salumi, Fior di Latte, Chili and Tomato

We stopped by Ancora this past Saturday to get our pizza fix. Having never been but reading about the place I was quite excited. The pizza is thin crust, Neopolitan style (dough is water, flour, yeast, and salt only), and cooked in a wood burning oven. This is the best way to make a pizza.
We started off with their meatballs as an appetizer. They came out on a plate with 3 racketball sized meatballs covered in marinara and a pool of olive oil on the side. The meatballs were kind of hard as if they were rolled too tight. The taste was decent and for only 6.00, it was pretty solid. I ordered a Margherita pizza for myself as it is fastly becoming my favorite kind of pizza. I was pretty underwhelmed by this one. The crust was too doughy and flimsy. With pizza you need that slight crunch then a little doughy texture, No crunch here. The pizza had a lot of charing on the bottom so I’m not sure what went wrong. It was still ok but for a place that has «Pizza Rules» like the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, I expected better.
I love the atmosphere though. Everything is 1 big open room giving it a very relaxed feel. The waiter was spot on with service and the prices were good. I’ll have to go back and give them another shot.