Rustique Pizza — Restaurant in Jersey City

Came here a few weeks ago and I'm happy to report that there is good pizza in Jersey City! Passionate owner? Check. Good ingredients? Check. Big ass brick oven? Check. Thats a hell of a start. I really like the place's storefront which is a short walk from busy Washington St. They are BYO which I'm sure is awesome if you're going here for dinner. The server I had was great, as was the owner Charlie who was walking around. Since we were interested, he filled us in on all of his philosophy behind the restaurant, how he makes most of his ingredients, and gave us the grand tour, even showing us one of his workers making fresh mozzarella in the basement. So far so great. We started out with a salad with marinated portobello mushrooms, a nice mix of greens, tomatoes, roasted red peppers, olives, and fresh mozzarella with a light vinaigrette dressing. This was a great salad! The fresh mozzarella tasted like it had just been made--which was true--and packed great milky flavor. The roasted red peppers were also a standout for me, and the mushrooms were very good as well. The pizza was really good but fell just short of great for me. It seems to be inspired by the old NY coal oven places like Lombardi's and Patsy's; fresh mozzarella, tomato sauce, a little basil, and olive oil . The sauce needed a little time to settle, but once it did it was very good with the roast garlic jn it supplementing the tomatoes well . The homemade fresh mozzarella is rinsed two more times for the pizza, whereas on the salad it was rinsed only once. To be honest, I wish they hadn't done this as this left the mozzarella without the moisture needed to make its full flavor stand out. The crust was nice and crisp but was a little thick and it didn't have much flexibility or depth of flavor. If you like a really crisp crust then this will be a big plus, but don't expect the whole crisp-but-pliant ideal ratio here, nor much char. As a whole this pizza was balanced well enough, but the full combination of flavors and depth that I was hoping for wasn't there. The ingredients were great but they didn't come together and stand out as well as...

DO NOT ORDER DELIVERY. This place is a joke, 3 hours of waiting, 3 calls made to ask for its whereabouts, we were told they were going to expedite it. Well we are still waiting for our pizza. There are multiple reviews with the same complaints. Do yourself a favor and don’t order from this place. It is not a serious restaurant and don’t take customer service seriously at all.

EDIT: in response to the restaurant’s reply I would note - if your restaurant is so busy that it will take multiple hours to fulfill an order, have some common sense and turn off the delivery option? We ordered at around 6.20pm, there is no reason that when we called for the third time after 9pm the food still had not been made?? What kind of a restaurant does this? None that I’ve ever come across in my over 4 decades of life on this planet! Shame on us for waiting because we didn’t believe a restaurant could possibly behave like this and treat customers as such. They didn’t even offer an apology! Tip to the owner - look at your delivery order for that night and you will easily find our cancelled order under one initialled MS. If you had any ounce of courtesy, respect and manners you would call us to apologize and make this right. But you do not care about your service so naturally you behave as such. Words are empty, and your response is hollow to us - judging from google reviews this has been an ongoing problem so clearly not sth Rustique has taken...

My girlfriend and I came here last Friday for a pizza Friday dinner after wanting to try Rustique for a while now.

I'll start with the space - it's pretty small. It looks like it used to be a bar or something? I definitely feel like they could rework it to fit more tables in and make it a better design overall. That being said, it's really not bad. I just feel like the awkwardly placed counter seating in the middle of the restaurant takes up more space than it's good for.

For an appetizer we got the buffalo wings, because I'm always craving wings. I was pleasantly surprised - just a little crisp to them, layered in a not-too-spicy buffalo sauce. One order came with six wings.

We ordered the half and half pizza - half margherita, half white. While both were good, we both agreed that we liked the white more. The flavors of the cheeses coming together worked perfectly. I also really enjoyed the flavor of their crust. Overall, a good pie.

We've got so many pizza places to try, I'm not sure how soon we'll be back here. It didn't stand out as one of the absolute must have top contenders of pizza in JC, but it was very good. I think it's a good option to get if you want this particular style of pizza - I don't think it's a style of pizza I'd get for something like a...