Emilia’s Pizzeria pairs a quirky ordering process with technical expertise from a Flour + Water alum
March 7, 2026
East Bay Express -When my friend recently told me, breathlessly, about her experience ordering from Emilia’s Pizzeria in Berkeley, it sounded unhinged.
Emilia’s Pizzeria is “a one-guy takeout-pizza-making concern” open Tuesday through Friday and occasionally Saturdays — you’ll have to check the website to find out. Only 30 pizzas are available per day, and online ordering opens promptly at 8:55 a.m. Pizza pickup times are hyper-specific, from 6:09 to 7:37.
So when I decided to try ordering one of these elusive pizzas myself, I was mentally prepared for a nail-biting experience akin to buying Taylor Swift tickets. The no-frills Emilia’s website, which looks like the type of early 2000s interface I might have browsed in my childhood best friend’s computer room to the tune of an AOL dial-up, immediately tried to reassure me: “There’s Nothing Insidious about Emilia’s Pizzeria.”
While I was overwhelmed by the exhaustive list of pizza options — nearly 60 combinations — I made my choice as quickly as possible. My heart raced as I was placed in a randomized queue to await a pickup time. I entered a password to prove I’d read the terms and conditions: If I didn’t pick up my pizza within 45 minutes, it might be thrown away. And then, sweet relief: A mere 10 minutes after I’d logged on, my pizza was secured.
When I arrived at Emilia’s a few minutes before my 6:37 p.m. pickup time, I was a little nervous. Surely the person behind this website would be a gruff pizzaiolo who would sneer at me as I meekly accepted my pizza box. But instead, when I walked up to the window, I met Keith Freilich, who was anything but that.
An unassuming, friendly guy in a baseball cap with a dry sense of humor, Freilich has been running Emilia’s on Shattuck Avenue since 2009. Given the tiny size of the Pizza Fulfillment Center, as it’s dubbed on the website, it’s by necessity a one-man operation: “It’s just a little closet where I make pizza, basically,” Freilich said.
Growing up in New Jersey, he said his first job in high school was at Pizza Hut, followed by a stint working at coal-fired pizza spot Grimaldi’s in Hoboken. He later moved to California for an IT career in Silicon Valley but eventually found himself drawn back to the pizza oven.
Working in restaurants “was hectic and it was fun,” Freilich said. “It was a little nuts. The corporate world was a lot less fun in comparison. That was part of why I wanted to go back. I never stopped loving pizza.”
When his daughter was born, he wanted a job that allowed him to work evenings so he could take care of her during the day. He honed his pizza skills at Pizzaiolo in Oakland and Flour + Water in San Francisco until 2009, when he opened his very own pizzeria named after his daughter Emilia, who was 4 years old at the time.
Freilich’s pizza is a combination of the New York style he learned at Grimaldi’s along with the Californian style he picked up in Bay Area pizzerias. The thin-crust, natural yeast pizzas are 18 inches “cut into 8 unequal slices,” per the website, with a soft and chewy crust spotted with just the right amount of char.
The mushroom and onion pizza I ordered ($32.78) might be my new favorite in the East Bay: bright and tangy tomato sauce spread over the top of the melty mozzarella, festooned with fresh basil, meaty mushrooms, peppery slivers of red onion and a shower of parmesan. The tantalizing smell of the pizza was so strong that it lingered in my car for a full day after, taunting me to go back and order another.
“It’s basically always just been, ‘What do I want pizza to be like? What do I think would be the best possible way a pizza could be?’” Freilich said.
While his pizzas seem classic now, Freilich was a bit of a pioneer in the Bay Area scene when he started in 2009. “There’s a lot more pizza that’s like what I make than there was when I opened,” he said. The California-style crust that’s somewhere between New York and Neapolitan is everywhere now. One of his most popular pizzas is the Gina Calabrese with Calabrian hot sauce, onion and soppressata. No one had heard of soppressata 15 years ago, he said — now, it’s ubiquitous.
Despite my preconceived notions about Emilia’s, it was not actually that difficult to obtain one of these beauties on a random Wednesday. Freilich said that during COVID-19 lockdown, he was consistently slammed — but demand has since slowed. Yet the perception that the ordering process is a bloodbath persists.
“Despite rumors to the contrary, it’s very easy to do and very easy to get, for the most part,” Freilich said.
The famous website, which he said he coded himself, was intended to be as helpful as possible — not to scare people off. He’s toned down the wordiness over the years, but “I’m still compelled to be accurate and transparent as much as I can,” he said. “I can’t stand a website that doesn’t tell you the truth.”
The specific pickup times, for example, are a deliberate calculation to ensure that each pizza hits the box at peak freshness. One reason Freilich chose to code his own ordering system is that, five years ago, platforms like Square only allowed for 15-minute pickup windows.
“A 15-minute-old pizza is not the same as a zero-minute-old pizza,” he said.
And as for the nearly 60 different pizzas on the menu? Well, Emilia’s used to be a build-your-own pizza operation, but “then some people had bad ideas and wanted pizzas that were disasters,” Freilich said.
He still wanted everyone to be able to get the exact pizza they wanted, though — so roughly six dozen options is his version of limiting them. He compares his menu to Taco Bell, “in the sense that it’s a handful of different things in a hundred combinations.”
Some pizzas on the menu are for one specific customer, like the R2, a no-cheese vegetarian pizza. (The customer has since moved away, but sometimes the R2 still gets ordered.) Another pizza with extra cheese and a smorgasbord of meats was once dubbed the “forbidden pizza,” he said. The heavy mess of toppings made it prone to failure, so he often wouldn’t let people order it. But for the one customer who loved it, he kept it on the menu.
When Freilich first opened Emilia’s, he thought of the tiny space as a “starter restaurant” and of hiring more people. But he’s never felt the need to change it. Being a one-man-operation has always felt right to him. “I do not get lonely in there, or basically anywhere else,” he said. “I’m an introvert.”
It’s also given him the gift of work-life balance. Doing everything himself means he can have a flexible schedule. When Emilia was little, he could leave to pick her up from school and bring her back, where she could sit in the restaurant and do her homework. If he needed to take a day off for family reasons, he could just close up shop without affecting anyone else’s livelihood.
As the Bay Area pizza scene has grown and evolved, Freilich is grateful to have graduated from buzzy new eatery to Berkeley mainstay. “Having been around for a while is good because people understand what you’re doing better,” he said. But he admits to feeling a bit older these days, especially when customers who first visited as children return as married adults.
His daughter, too, has grown up and is now in college. He’s not pushing her to take over the family business, but he wants to make sure that she always has it as a fallback. “I want that option for her if the world falls apart,” he said.
So if you’re looking for a great pie in the East Bay, don’t be scared off by the website. Behind the anxiety-inducing queues and 5:52 p.m. pickup times is just a nice guy named Keith who really loves pizza.
“It’s always me,” he said. “You go there, you know who you’re going to see.”
Emilia’s Pizzeria, 2995 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. Open Tuesday through Friday (and sometimes on Saturday). Same-day takeout orders can be placed on the website starting at 8:55 a.m.
