On our last full day visiting with our friends in Saratoga Springs, we decided to drive down to nearby Ballston Spa in order to do some thrift store shopping. Oh, I’m already well-stocked, but our friends managed to score quite a few items for their new condo, including a most-awesome, mint-condition vintage 1960s waffle iron from ReShop, identical to the one that my parents still use to this day (“don’t try to clean that, the seasoning is over 50 years old!”). After a few other choice finds, including some vintage FiestaWare, we retired to the nearby Speckled Pig Brewing Company for some lunch.
Speckled Pig has a very interesting building: built into the steep hillside between Washington Street and Front Street, the resulting building ends up being wedge-shaped; the primary entrance on the second floor ends up having a nice-second story view, and the rooftop bar area goes from being only 10 feet above the ground on one end to having an impressive panoramic view of Ballston Spa on the other.
While I’m not sure what type of building it used to be before it got converted, they kept the wooden floors and did everything up as a fairly open space, which reminds me more than a bit of another nearby brewer, the former Outer Limits in Cavendish, VT. With a large central bar and long bench seating, it’s a nice spot.
Looking the other way, you can see the highlight of their kitchen: the large dome of the pizza oven (almost all of the menu is wood-fired pizza), and the tanks of the brewery behind that. But while the space was nicely welcoming and open, the real seating attraction is the little side door that tanks you up to the rooftop terrace. Their service model is a bit weird: for some odd reason, you can’t actually use credit cards for beer, or order pizza, but you can buy drink tokens and purchase food downstairs, and have the items brought upstairs (in these sorts of cases, my initial inclination is to always blame “permitting”, but I don’t know the real story here). Weird, but it still basically works.
And the rooftop? It’s a nice spot. A covered bar, half a dozen tables, and a few “sectional sofa” areas make it a nice place to hang out (an apology here: it’s been almost 10 weeks since I visited, so they’ve doubtless closed the patio for the winter…)
The beer itself at Speckled Pig was good. I’ve gotten used to just about everyone having some sort of New England Hazy IPA on their tap list, but they get some bonus points for spreading out to other traditional styles: I had a märzen (shown), which was quite nicely executed and good for a nice afternoon in the sun.
But while I enjoyed the beer, for me the star of the show at Speckled Pig was the pizzas. Like a lot of wood-fired oven places, they optimize their cooking around a single pizza size, so they’ve got a wide menu of different house pizza styles, all served up as (moderately large) personal pizza. We decided as a group of four that each of us would get a different style, and we could each sample the other pizzas. First up, the Old School, which was indeed old school: house tomato sauce, mozzarella, homemade fennel sausage, caramelized onions, bell peppers, and parmesan. The attraction here was the sausage, a nice, sweet Italian mix with lots of fresh fennel notes. Add in some good cheese, a nice not-sweet tomato sauce, and a really-nicely moderate-char wood-fired crust, and this was a good start to the pizza.
Next up was a less-traditional pizza selection, the Figgy Piggy. With house ricotta, mozzarella, sliced figs, prosciutto, arugula, balsamic drizzle, and parmesan, this was a sweeter pizza, with nicely seared figs pairing nicely with the bitter notes of the frest arugula (tossed on immediately before serving, so it didn’t wilt much). Again, a nicely executed crust.
Our next pizza was another veer back towards the traditional with The Brando: house tomato sauce, mozzarella, soppressata, homemade fennel sausage, pepperoni, hot honey drizzle, parmesan. The same fennel sausage as the Old School shines here as well, now paired with a very nicely spicy soppressata (with nice big chunks of peppercorn in it). The hot honey drizzle was a bit more of a sweet note than I was otherwise expecting, but a great classic pizza overall, and probably my starting point for ordering on my next visit.
Our final pizza was the least tradition one. The Dill Pickle, with, you guessed it, dill pickles, mozzarella, ranch, hot honey drizzle, parmesan. I wouldn’t want one of these every day, but the particularly good acidic note added some nice dimensions to the flavors. I wonder if they could do something similar with pickled pepperoncini peppers.
Overall, we loved The Speckled Pig. Good beers and great to-order pizzas, with a nice list of toppings ranging from classic to inventive, in a nicely-refurbished building with a friendly staff. I’ll definitely come back at some point.
