St. Louis restaurateur Gerard Craft shares details on Fordo’s Killer Pizza at City Foundry STL

Next month, chef Gerard Craft will premiere new concept Fordo’s Killer Pizza, which will take the form of a booth inside the City Foundry STL food hall. The restaurant will offer pizza, starters, gelato, natural wine and more. “Fordo’s is about having fun,” said Craft, whose middle name is Ford. “It’s like if the kid Fordo grew up.”

The naturally fermented pizzas will be made using imported flour and cooked using an Italian Acunto wood-fired oven. Craft worked for a long time on his dough recipe and technique, which will be the basis of three or four regular ’zas as well as a few rotating specials. Helping run the kitchen is Joe Luckey, who worked at Pastaria for four years. “Pastaria is a huge restaurant – this is much more intimate,” he explained. “I already have a long list of ideas for pizzas,” he said, laughing.

Out of the gate, Fordo’s will offer a taco pizza and a shakshuka pizza, as well as a Margherita and a marinara. Starters will include a prosciutto plate, marinated olives, a hummus dish and spicy, sticky buns with calabrian chile pesto. Wine will be offered by the glass and in cans, and a Negroni slushy will be on tap.

Craft said Fordo’s will collaborate with other Foundry vendors, like Alex Henry’s Sureste and Nate Hereford’s Chicken Scratch. (We’re pretty excited to see whether a Chez Ali pizza will surface.) Another prospective pie, according to Luckey, could be a Thai lettuce wrap pizza. Regarding the dissonance between traditional Neapolitan pizza and the more unconventional toppings of Fordo’s, Craft said, “I wanted it to be those polar opposites, using a base of something super classic with something more modern. There’s not a lot of diversity in Italian food.” It seems Fordo’s is here to change that, at least for St. Louis.