Meet Scrappie’s Pizzeria, Boston’s Most Sustainable (and Hardest-to-Snag) Pizza

Scrappie’s Pizzeria. / Photo by Andrew Blau/Scrappie’s

It’s 11:58 a.m. on a Monday and hundreds of people are waiting for a pizza text. When that doughful ding arrives, recipients have two minutes to sign into Hotplate, a food preorder app, for a chance to buy one of Andrew Blau’s highly coveted, weekly pies. A little ticker in the app keeps track of all the fans scrambling like Taylor Swift concert hopefuls. Two hundred people here. Two hundred and nine. Three hundred. Once noon hits, even if you’re already in the ordering window, you’re likely to receive this message: “All the available inventory is in other carts, but more may soon become available!”

Fat chance. It’s almost always an instant sellout, with fans vying for maybe 80 sustainable pizzas a week—all made from bread scraps sourced from local restaurants—that are then prepped, cooked, and picked up at Brick Street Bagels in Southie. This is the process for Scrappie’s Pizzeria, a pop-up operating inside a former pop-up, where Blau is also Brick Street’s chief operating officer (his fun title, he says, is “Chief Bagel Officer”).

Not too long ago, Brick Street was the hot pop-up in town before landing its South Boston permanent address. Now Scrappie’s is taking up the mantle and wrestling with demand. Blau tries to look at Hotplate every week during the ordering period, he says. “But then it’s always pretty anxiety-inducing because it’s just so many people in there. I think this week it was 700 people at once.”

When Blau first launched Scrappie’s in April 2025, the Barrington, Rhode Island native had never made pizza before—cooking up 25 pizzas and selling them for under $10. (Now they range from $22-$29 for a single personal-ish-sized pie.) At first, the premise was simple: He wanted to test the idea that he could help reduce food waste by making pizza dough that incorporated pulverized leftover bread from a few Beacon Hill restaurants (who have asked to remain anonymous). He advertised on Instagram, and through social media and word of mouth, his pies turned into something of a phenomenon. “I was lucky that people were interested in the sustainability aspect enough that they were willing to give it a try,” he says. “I’m happy they tried it, but I’m sure those pizzas were godawful compared to what I’m dishing out now.”

That kind of self-deprecation is fine and good, but in a city that already boasts stellar pizza, Scrappie’s would have fizzled out long ago if it were just a gimmick. But after snagging one of Boston’s most prized pies? Safe to say I was in Hotplate the following week, faced with that same whomp-whomp of an error message as I tried to order. Because Scrappie’s isn’t “decent for pizza that’s made of bread waste.” It’s great pizza, full stop.

Every week, Blau offers six core pizzas and a special or two. Most are graced with a hefty dose of grated parmesan cheese once they pop out of the oven; Blau says his biggest expense is the $120 a week he spends on 24-month-aged parm. The pizzas range from fairly traditional (the classic cheese is made with red sauce, mozzarella, and fresh basil) to creative (the bianco, a white pizza, has a miso Caesar base, mozzarella, and red onion for some punch). A spicy pepperoni pie—cup-and-char pepperoni topped with pickled Fresno chilis and jalapeños, finished with a drizzle of Mike’s Hot Honey—saw an uptick in orders thanks to a visit by Boston food influencer Keonté Henson (AKA @wannabestayathomedad). Chili crisp ‘nduja, a recent addition to the permanent menu, features Blau’s own Bagel Boy chili crisp that he makes for Brick Street (featuring everything bagel seasoning and Sichuan chili flakes), emulsified with house-made sausage to create the ‘nduja, a spreadable Italian-style sausage. Along with a light dusting of parm, that pie is topped with a pecorino sour cream. “You get that salty funkiness from the pecorino, but I add a little bit of agave to make it a little sweet to balance the heat,” he says. “I’d say that’s my favorite pie on the menu at the moment.”

Scrappie’s Pizzeria. / Photo by Andrew Blau/Scrappie’s

All of these flavors and toppings are just decorations, of course—what makes Scrappie’s unique is its crust. “I would say pizzas are 70% dough, 30% what you put on top of it,” Blau says. The crust is super crispy, with perfectly charred black bubbles and a chewy interior. There’s a slight tang to it thanks to the sourdough breadcrumbs in the dough.

As for how Blau rose to this dough-casion, he’s mainly self-taught. (Scrappie’s is mostly a one-man operation, with occasional help from Blau’s pal Greg Hasegawa, who used to work at a pizza shop in Seattle before moving to Boston. He’s taught Blau about stretching and shaping dough, and he sometimes comes up with specials, like a recent jalapeño-popper-influenced pie.) Before starting Scrappie’s and joining Brick Street, Blau worked in procurement at Boston Beer Company, where he helped sell spent grain products for animal feed and other uses. Sustainability has been his through-line for a while.

In 2023, Blau heard about how Jordan Renouf had started hand-making small batches of bagels and selling them around Boston as the pop-up Brick Street Bagels. Blau asked if Renouf needed help and joined the operation as the first hire. The duo rented space in the Bar Mezzana kitchen from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m. to cook bagels, before Blau headed to his Boston Beer nine-to-five. “I think of those long days very fondly, but I would never do it again,” he says.

The bagel business boomed—so much so that Brick Street started a residency at the South End Buttery, and Blau left his full-time beer gig. (This South End residency is still going, alongside the newer permanent store in South Boston.) During early morning runs delivering bagels, Blau kept noticing just how much waste local restaurants generated. At the same time, he’d heard about a company in Copenhagen that makes pasta with leftover bread, which got the wheels turning for him. (He also jokes that he was bored with just one job.) The science of dough is what interested him in Brick Street—and what else could you use dough for? Pizza, of course.

He asked restaurants around Beacon Hill if he could have their leftover bread and spent about six months developing his signature dough, which uses essentially finely pulsed breadcrumbs as its base. But the breadcrumbs don’t actually react with yeast at all, so he bolsters his “bread scrap flour” with a mix of five flours, including King Arthur 00 and high-gluten flour. And no, before you ask: Scrappie’s doesn’t use leftover bagels from Brick Street. “They’re just dense, and I don’t have a blender that would be able to handle them,” he says. “I’m already on my third blender. And my fiancée is just super excited about that, as you can imagine.”

When Brick Street opened its flagship standalone location in South Boston in October 2025, Scrappie’s set up shop there. Already, Blau is eyeing expansion. Slow expansion, that is—much to the chagrin of people who send him impatient messages about how hard it is to get his pizza. “I don’t really care about the money as much,” he says. “It still continues to be a passion project to try to reduce food waste. That’s why I don’t feel a ton of pressure to scale up super fast; I’m doing this for fun.”

The fun, lately, has been trying to turn the ideas scribbled in his notebooks into pizzas. He’s been tinkering, for example, with an ode to Crispy Gài in Portland. That pizza-in-the-works features a spicy sauce topped by Thai basil, pickled chiles, and pork floss. He’s hoping to offer a bigger supply of pizzas, too, by possibly adding a third weekly ordering day. He’s already doing some events, like a recent Whoop partnership for the Boston Marathon. And then maybe, just maybe? A Scrappie’s space of its own. He’s cautiously putting out feelers and looking for a spot. Just 450 square feet, maybe, and an oven. Not much. The man has already proven what he can do with scraps.

Andrew Blau of Scrappie’s Pizzeria. / Courtesy photo

Scrappie’s Pizzeria operates out of Brick Street Bagels on Wednesdays and Thursdays; preordering required: Test your luck at hotplate.com/scrappiespizzeria Mondays at noon. 371 W Broadway, South Boston, instagram.com/scrappies.pizzeria.