Brick Wood Fired Pizza & Pasta

Former Location

2833 Monroe Avenue, Rochester NY, 14618

Status (as of March 2019)

Closed

Brick Wood Fired Pizza & Pasta was a wood fired pizzeria and dine-in restaurant on Monroe Avenue. Over the years, this location has been been many different restaurants; Mundo Grill, PaRe, and the Monroe Diner.

It opened on January 2nd, 2013.

Comments:

Note: You must be logged in to add comments

2013-01-27 18:09:39 We tried this place for lunch today and I was very disappointed. The restaurant is small with limited seating. The building had some extensive remodeling and no longer as any of Monroe Diner's kitschiness. There is a large bar area and several high top tables and regular tables. We order the wood fired wings with killer hot sauce, the mushroom, bacon, cheese burger, and a pizza with pepperoni, sausage, and jalapeno peppers. Meals come with complimentary salad and bread. The bread comes with warm marinara sauce. In the unlikely event I decided to give Brick a second chance, this marinara sauce was tasty enough to make me want to try the pasta. The salad was served family style. It is reminiscent of Olive Garden's salad, except Brick drowns their salad in some sort of white dressing. If the salad is made with fresh ingredients, there is no need to overdress it. This one was too soggy to eat. The wood fired chicken wings were very good. They were moist and meaty. We ordered the killer hot sauce, but the sauce was really more of a medium-hot sweet and spicy sauce. While the sauce wasn't particularly spicy, it was tasty. If you go to Brick, I would recommend the wood fired wings. Burgers are served with potato wedges or pub chips. I ordered my burger medium-rare with pub chips. I don't know why the server bothered to ask how I wanted my burger cooked. Given the size of the patty, I am not sure even a great chef could manage a medium-rare. And Brick's cook is not a great chef. My burger came out charred on the outside and completely gray inside. The bacon was crispy and the mushrooms were fresh and well-cooked. The cheese was a sticky, cheap American single. The bun was gigantic and out of proportion with the burger. For $9, I would expect something better. However, I should have known better since Brick sells their burgers with a draft beer for $5 on Wednesdays. My burger was maybe worth $5 if it came with a beer. I generally like wood fired pizza, but not this time. The pizza making station is located in the dining room. If I hadn't seen them making it, I would have sworn it was a frozen pizza. The pizza dough wasn't seasoned and was undercooked. The cheese was poor quality and the pepperoni and sausage were just average. Both Lucca and even the not so great Napa offer better wood fired pizzas. Despite striking out on both entrees, the nice looking bar and yummy wings be sufficient to make me come again if the service hadn't been terrible. I know Brick recently opened and their servers likely have never waited tables before, but I expect any server to have at least eaten at restaurants in the past and understand what good service looks like. In this case, the wings came out without extra napkins, I wasn't offered ketchup or any other condiment for my dry hockey puck burger, our drinks sat empty from mid-appetizer through the entrees until we finally asked a passing server for refills, and we had to ask a passing server for the check. We had a server, but she clearly didn't have time for us. On a recent episode of Top Chef, guest judge Danny Meyer said "you go to a restaurant the first time for the food, but you keep going back for the service." The service we received at Brick does not make me want to go back. —christineh

2013-01-31 17:27:12 Tried it for lunch today and I would go back again. Had the mac&cheese pizza and found it to be a lot more enjoyable than what Napa serves. Plenty of noodles and cheese and bacon on every slice. The white sauce and cheddar/mozz mixture made for one tasty slice. I mixed it up a little by taking some of the marinara sauce from the bread sticks and putting it on a couple of the slices. I plan on going back to try some of their pasta offerings and the hawaiian burger. —rudy

2013-02-25 15:07:26 Really wanted to like this place, ever since the Mundo closed I have been waiting for a decent alternative place to eat. Any hopes I had for brick were dashed when I tried it. The salad and bread is OK (if that is what you are into) but why try to mimic olive garden? Had the wood fired wings, OK but should be described as wood fire 're-heated' wings. A little dry and overcooked. Good selection of beers (didn't try so can't comment). Now to the main, my friend had pasta with a meatball and a sausage. The sausage (a $2 addition) was a one inch slice of sausage. He did not eat the pasta, on the over firm side of al dente (i.e. undercooked). I had the San Fransisco pizza, simply inedible. As one poster below described it was most certainly undercooked, doughy and soggy. It just seems the oven isn't up to the job. Our server was OK but there is strange vibe about the staff generally. They were hanging out watching TV (you had to budge past them to get to the bathroom, with its overflowing waste bin), one of the chefs came out of the kitchen to help themselves to a drink behind the bar. Just felt a little like they didn't want to be there...I echo all of the comments below about the poor attention from the staff. It was the same when it was the terrible diner previously, perhaps it is the same owner? I really hope it picks up and gets better, you can't beat a place to go hang out with a decent bar and a good pizza (look at how well JoJo does) and it is a great location. Unfortunately I will not be back..... unless I see some reviews starting to tell a different story.. —sieats

2013-03-05 08:46:10 Last night we tried this place for the first time and ordered takeout. We brought home the wood fired Garlic Parmesan wings and Meat Lover's pizza. I would really like to be able to leave a positive comment regarding the food, but unfortunately, our meal last night was an epic fail. As my son was eating a slice of pizza, at least three times he spit out what he thought were bones. I looked at what was on his plate, and yes, they were very small bone fragments, perhaps from the sausage. The wings were dry and overcooked, many of them were really small, and a few of them had most of the meat missing from the bone. I'm not sure if the meat falls off when they shake them up in the sauce, but getting a container of meatless chicken wing bones is really disappointing when you bring home takeout. And if the meat did fall off while being shook up in the sauce, where was the sauce? These wings had the essence of garlic Parmesan, they smelled fantastic, but were really very dry. Overall, the quality of food and ingredients was really substandard. We will not be spending money in this restaurant again. —AnnMK

2013-08-30 01:12:11 The wood fired wings were great. I had a lot of meat on mine and they were cooked to the point where the meat was falling of the bone, but not dried out. The interior is beautiful with gleaming bar taps and a wood burning oven. I liked eating outside, where the service was attentive, unlike other outdoor dining situations. My friend and I figured that there were so many layers of paint on the wall from the different prior establishments, that they painted the brick "look" onto the exterior wall. Their logo uses an attractive and well thought out font, unlike Papyrus Font. —benmargolis

2019-03-07 10:04:55 GBNF - sign in window says Salvatore's coming soon —AdrienneDahler