The Earth’s crust: Despite being cooked in a firebrick oven, Earth Bread + Brewery’s pizza sagged in the middle. (photo by michael persico)

Slice of Strife

Earth Bread + Brewery has mediocre eats and weak beers.

A funny thing happened on the way to Mt. Airy. The sleet was falling. The wipers were thumping. The Google Maps directions were as unclear as my precipitation-slicked windshield. One wrong exit, then another, and I wound up on the scenic route to Earth Bread + Brewery.

Every time you think you know Philadelphia, another part of the city surprises you. When I finally landed at Earth Bread + Brewery, I found the bakery/brewhaus similarly full of surprises.

Some are pleasant, like the empty Saison Dupont bottles repurposed as wax-encrusted candelabras; the nifty pub tables sprouting elevated pizza pedestals; and the tangible neighborhood camaraderie that swells up through the tongue-and-groove pine flooring reclaimed from a warehouse in Maine.

With nine months of eco-conscious renovation, owners Tom Baker and Peggy Zwerver turned a sprawling, 4,200-square-foot vacant pub into the district’s de facto village green, where the hand dryers are energy-efficient, the toilets are water-conserving, and the polyurethane-alternative lacquering on the wood surfaces is made from the same soybeans the restaurant serves steamed with sea salt and fresh lime.

On the Friday night of my visit, it appeared the entire community, babies and all, had surrendered to the innate human craving for pizza and beer. The snow fell in flat flakes outside as my server set down a pint of Schuylkill Bitter, Earth’s crisp ESB, while another delivered a pack of crayons to an eager little Goldilocks.

Other surprises were not so great, like when the pizzas—called flatbreads—arrived with flaccid crusts not befitting the 650-degree wood-burning firebrick oven. The crunchy, sooty perimeters weren’t the problem. Rather, the pies’ interiors sagged, a strange phenomenon since saucing was refreshingly light-handed.

Earth’s pizzaoilas use King Arthur flour for the flatbread dough, which imparts a wholesome aroma and flavor, but what’s on top brought them down: squash and eggplant roasted to mush, bland cubes of potato that added little to a pesto-dressed pie. The black bean-and-corn-studded Mexican was the exception, deceptively spicy from its jalapeño-and-smoked- paprika-spiked marinara.

Other choices included a fine arugula salad tossed with goat cheese, dried cranberries and candied pecans, and warm-you-up-right tomato soup served with fingers of fluffy fresh bread made from leftover pizza dough. I’d have considered the Night Kitchen bakery desserts had my check not been dropped before I’d asked. My server was nice enough, but seemed uncomfortable and jittery, particularly when reciting the monologue of beer descriptions just. Like this. As if. He. Was. Reading from. A cue card.

Chalkboards translated. Four Earth beers, crafted in the seven-barrel basement brewery, form the starting lineup at the two salvaged bars, while guest drafts like Troegenator and Walt Wit and craft and local bottles add depth to the roster. Light-bodied and low in alcohol—even the dark Baltic porter and the chocolaty Bradley Effect, an un-hopped Gruit ale that clocked only 3.8 percent ABV—the Earth beers were unexpected considering Baker and Zwerver’s last brewery called itself Heavyweight.

Beers are thoughtfully served in 13-ounce ($3.75) and 20-ounce ($5) pours, while the flatbreads come in the standard small and large. Consider the small a personal-size, while the large can feed two to three. Unless you happen to be the boy at the table behind me, about 12 years old, housing an entire large pie of Earth’s traditional pizza—roasted onions, marinara, mozzarella, tuft of seasonal greens and all.

Had junior spared a slice for later, he’d have been handed a sheet of recyclable aluminum foil—not a paper box or Styrofoam takeaway. Had he opted out of doggy-foiling, the waste would have been collected for composting along with the spent brewing grains and shipped to Germantown co-op farm Weavers Way. At Earth Bread + Brewery, that’s just how they do. Other restaurants, take note: Earth’s pizza might be soft, but its environmental backbone is as hardcore as they come.