Can a Sauceless Pizza with Sliced Heirloom Tomatoes Be Any Good?

Welcome to Consumed, in which Matt Duckor devours the food world, documenting the people, places, and plates that keep him hungry.

In case you hadn't noticed by now, it's Tomato Week here on BonAppetit.com. But really, on the East Coast, every week in August is tomato week. Blink twice and you'll find yourself stuffing an organic cotton tote full of them at the farmers' market without even knowing how you got there. Me? It means that every restaurant I'm eating at has heirloom tomatoes as a special on the menu. They're usually expensive, but always worth ordering (partially because good tomatoes with salt and burrata are tough to mess up).

So there I was last week, deep in Brooklyn at Roberta's, that beloved pizza place that isn't really just a pizza place. Over the course of several recent meals there overseen by chef de cuisine Nick Barker, who arrived in January from San Francisco, I've had glorious scallops draped in lardo and covered in sea buckthorn; house-made orecchiette with milk-braised goat ragu; and a knockout vegetable dish of broccoli, kale, and kohlrabi. This very good restaurant has never been better.

Even here, there were heirloom tomatoes. A pizza called "The Family Jewels" was announced as a special: mozzarella, Parmesan, heirloom tomatoes, garlic, basil, prosciutto breadcrumbs. This was something I'd never order. Too often white pies with whole slices of tomato on top are disastrous--even the most perfect can be ruined by soggy slivers of pink, green, and yellow. But we ordered it. Dining as a group of six is an exercise in compromise.

The pizza arrived amid a cavalcade of food, and one slice in, I realized I'd been dead wrong. The mix of green, yellow, and cherry tomatoes scattered atop retained their flavor (no one eats cooked tomatoes for the texture). There was acid! There was balance--the delicate tomatoes weren't drowned out by creamy mozzarella. But most important, it wasn't the pizza equivalent of a slip and slide, a watery mess that's always more fun in theory than in practice.

There's no air conditioning at Roberta's (not to mention a blazing fire in the wood-burning oven), but a chilled red wine from the the Jura region of France and the struggling ceiling fans meant I didn't mind. The food kept coming--a second pizza (with various bitter market greens), a third (with chard, mushrooms, and chili)--and the wine kept flowing under the glow of the restaurant's trademark Christmas lights.

And I couldn't stop thinking about those few perfect slices of fruit.