I've had wood-fired pizza that's just plain dried-out and burnt, and others that are indistinguishable from pizzas baked in a gas oven, and not even good examples of that, to boot.īut at Ember, I wasn't disappointed. It doesn't always work out that way, of course. If you're advertising wood-fired pizza, you're implicitly claiming to make pizza that stands out from the rest. Although Livonia's a little far south for me to travel for pizza, I'm willing to make an exception for wood-fired pizza, not because wood-fired pizza is necessarily better, but because it's still unusual, and because it ought to be better. It's now spread south, although geographically the Great Divide continues.Įmber Woodfire Grill opened in late 2009 in a converted train station in Livonia, a few miles east of the northern tip of Conesus Lake (and well east of the Genesee, which meanders in a more southwesterly direction at this latitude, although the cultural divide represented by the Genesee in Monroe County doesn't extend this far south).Įmber is not primarily a pizza place, but it does offer pizza, baked in a wood-fired oven.

Although a very few wood-fired pizza places in the Rochester area have been around for some time, the idea didn't really seem to take off until relatively recently in the past two or three years, wood-fired pizzerias have been springing up around here like mushrooms after a summer rain.įor whatever reason, the trend has been confined almost entirely to the east side of the Genesee River.

Emberwoodfire