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But someone else with a reputation for good baking and farmers’ market ingredients has been quietly honing their craft at pizza making since May, hand-making well-composed specialty pizzas on Friday and Saturday nights (which will become Fridays only in November). It’s Floriole Cafe & Bakery in Lincoln Park, specifically baker Rachel Post, who owner Sandra Holl says was “Floriole’s very first employee.”
- Michael Gebert
The pizzas reward curiosity but also, it must be said, patience—Post is almost the only one making them (she gets some help with the final dressing of baked pies) and a rush of customers around 6 PM backed up the oven and her ability to hand-make each pie for a good hour. But the ultimate goal is a spin-off pizza restaurant with a full kitchen and staff of its own— “somewhere, a year or two down the road,” Holl says. After a few years at Floriole, Post approached Holl about a business of her own, so they decided to use Floriole as the incubator for a restaurant combining Post’s pizzas with Holl’s ice creams. Holl also tests out a different flavor or technique each Friday night, usually a composed ice cream dessert with some kind of roasted fruit or other elements—though last Friday she wasn’t serving it at Floriole, because everything she made was going to the Pilot Light fund-raiser at Publican Quality Meats.
