Folks Pizzeria

Costa Mesa’s anti-malls The LAB and The CAMP each have noteworthy Neapolitan-inspired pizzerias: In 2020, The LAB became home to Japanese/Italian take out-only spot Kuro, while Folks Pizzeria has been The CAMP’s Italian/American alternative since 2019, offering full table service indoors and outdoors in a shaded nook near Boba Guys and Chafinity. Unlike Kuro, which is open most weekdays for lunch and focuses solely on pizzas, Folks only offers dinners (or early dinners) five days a week, expanding to lunch hours solely on weekends, while serving full menus of salads, appetizers, pizzas, and accompanying wines – most but not all from California vineyards.

On our visit, Folks was offering eight different pizzas: four red and four white, all at prices from $29 to $32, and with a single 14″ size. The consistent thread with these pizzas is their sourdough crust, which combines the elasticity, central thickness, and leopard-spotted char of a traditional Neapolitan with a thicker, darker edge that seems to be the only complaint anyone has about Folks’ recipes. Even though each pizza has roughly 12 inches of cheese, toppings, and (in the red versions) tomato sauce, the outer inch and a half or two is pure and elevated dough, crispy and decidedly not topped or stuffed with anything. If you love sourdough and crusts, you’ll love every bite of Folks’ pizzas; if not, you’ll have a plate full of bitten-through crispy bread left over at the end.

We tried one red pizza and one white pizza: an unmodified red-style salame calabrese ($32) with salami, basil leaves, tomato sauce, and mozzarella and pecorino cheeses, and a modified white-style mushroom ($32) with provolone and pecorino cheeses, a black truffle-flavored bechamel sauce, thyme, garlic cloves, and added fennel sausage (+$3). Other available pizzas included a classic pepperoni ($32), pancetta & potato ($31), soppressata ($32), and a spring pizza with asparagus, English peas, roasted onions, and four cheeses ($31). Each arrives cut in sixths, a slice size that makes folding pieces advisable when eating, keeping the extra virgin olive oil used in every pizza from dripping on your chin.

To our tastes, the combination of high-quality ingredients, really nice dough, and perfectly charred thin crusts made both of the Folks pizzas very good, though with small caveats. Those seeking super punchy flavors – salty, sour, or spicy – won’t find them, at least in the versions we sampled; the recipes and execution seem to be calibrated for more sophisticated palates. We’d describe the balance as simultaneously somewhat healthier and more dough-forward than at, say, Apizza Doho, while also being a bit more expensive.