Some are born to be chefs; others discover suddenly that they have been in kitchens their entire life. “Cooking for me just came out of nowhere. I just woke up one day with this urge to cook,” says Michael Patlazhan, who is now spending his weekdays working busily by himself in a ghost kitchen on Ingraham Street. It’s his first semi-permanent, semi-brick and mortar, fittingly called “Whim.” The letters, in minimal, thin font, appear like a sudden advertisement for a watch, amid thin white and black lines. On a whim, he’s now baking pizzas. In fact, he’s baking some of the better, more adventurous pies you will find on that corner of mid-scale dives and smoldering dreams.
It had taken Patlazhan a while to get there; a Russian immigrant who moved to Brooklyn at the age of ten, he grew up in Sheepshead Bay, and eventually found himself deep in the trenches at Bloomberg (“I just did what most people do when they don’t know what to do, I went to business school,” he says now about his Brooklyn College business degree), when he decided to start taking classes, instead, at the private French Culinary Institute, back when it existed, back when it was in SoHo, when it was that breeding ground for a particular kind of manicured, small plate, urbane perfectionism. While his wife had stuck around working the Bloomberg terminals (the pair live in Staten Island now), Patlazhan’s culinary years had been tumultuous; line cook gigs at shuttered Park Avenue eateries, an episode-length stint on Top Chef, after the Bravo show had plucked him from relative culinary school obscurity. “I think the challenge was a corn soup,” Patlazhan says now, before admitting “I don’t think TV is for me, that’s what I found out.” In the years since, he would take jobs doing what he calls “high level” catering, amid running his share of pop-ups too, in the cramped cafes of nearby galleries, where he would dutifully craft potato-skin ice cream and buttermilk dots dipped in liquid nitrogen, and where Patlazhan told me the rent was hardly worth the minimal foot traffic.
Opportunity finally came his way when he reconnected with Arseny Libon, a friend from high school who speaks in a deep, gregarious New York accent. Libon had also dipped, over a decade ago, out of the working with computers and into the idea of selling somewhat higher art. Along with a few friends, Libon was involved in running an outfit called the Bottleneck Gallery, a Williamsburg group that had managed to find a decent living out of shipping what Libon called “alternate movie posters,” and other kinds of legally licensed geek material to dormrooms around the world. (“All licensed, original work,” says Libon.)
The group was moving into a new space in Bushwick, into the hurriedly vacated home of No Aloha, a once-ambitious club named after the Breeders song, which had once boasted two floors and no fewer than six differently designed bathrooms. Both it — and “Bootsie’s,” a pizza concept that had opened inside of it — had seemingly disappeared without a trace sometime last year. Libon, who currently uses the once nightlife hotspot to store and ship out licensed riffs on Dune posters, didn’t have any use for the elaborate kitchen left behind. It was there Patlazhan saw his chance to make a go out of making some pizzas.
The way Patlazhan, the one-time Top Chef contestant, makes them is interesting. Personal and pan-sized, running from $18-24, they feel less like pies and more like ideas, roving concepts that playfully wink and tease at the possibilities, frustrations and joys of making and eating food. He dresses each of them up elaborately, tending to them with the kind of pained and pointed diligence of a painter buried in oils.
He had arrived at pizza after becoming, like many, obsessed with making sourdough during the pandemic and had figured, as he told me, that “more people could relate to pizza.” He still speaks of baking with a student’s experimental reverence, searching constantly to find magic in mixing salt, yeast, flour and water into something dexterous and chewy. He is detailed about where he sources his flour, buying from brands like Central Milling and Cairnspring Mills, describing the latter as a place that “mills all their flour fresh.” Among his ideas is the idea that crusts could double as a kind of versatile breadstick, which he makes soft enough to gently rip into pieces. In aid of this, he also sells handmade dips ($8-9) like hummus, labneh and a kind of muhammara he makes out of nardello peppers, pomegranate molasses and walnuts.
The pizzas themselves turn out to be remarkable canvases for this style of mixing and matching. His basic red pie, called “love at first bite,” has a hardy mouthfeel, too exquisitely layered to taste plain and collapsing delicately at the touch. Another pie, called the “forager,” arrives in the form of a mossy green of maitake mushrooms and grilled chanterelles, perhaps the closest thing in Bushwick you can find to those quiet Napa Valley farm-to-tables. More adventurous, seasonal toppings include a squash-filled pizza floating in a small pool of mole, and another fashioned out of a sharp, wonderland of corn puree. Baked in his oven, the dark black dough can look burnt, but instead tastes remarkably fresh and best bathed in the rich, flavorful hummus that Patlazhan makes fresh.
Around the once bustling kitchen (before No Aloha had taken it over, the kitchen had been assembled initially by the people who run the Commodore in Williamsburg, who had outfitted the erstwhile warehouse into a tex-mex outpost and hipster haunt called El Cortez, notable for its popular frozen drinks and Mac Demarco sightings. Remember him?), Patlazhan hustles about, by himself. The room is now littered with containers filled with produce he’s bought from the farmer’s market at Union Square, his favorite bottles of hot honey (he prefers the once-local “Bushwick Kitchen” to the ubiquitous “Mike’s Hot,” telling me, “I know they’re not in Bushwick anymore, but I still like having something different”), and the tomatoes that he tenderly roasts himself, in a little box next to his oven. It’s the kind of earnest, homespun charm that Bushwick pizzerias are made of.
“Roberta’s, they made this area what it is. There’s a lot of history,” he says, “But I’m doing something different.”
Whim is located at 17 Ingraham Street and is open for pick-up and delivery from Monday to Wednesday, from 3pm to 8pm, and Thursday to Friday, from 4pm to 9pm. Keep up with Patlazhan’s changing menu on instagram and order a pie here.
Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.
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