Third Time’s the Charm is located at 275 Van Brunt Street, between Pioneer Street and Visitation Place, and the kitchen is currently open on Wednesday through Sunday from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., though you can drink until midnight on Friday and Saturday.
Five years ago, Chris Milazzo had no plans on becoming a pizza maker, much less a restaurant owner. “I was a lawyer before all this, but I hated it,” he told Brooklyn Magazine as we sat in the pleasant backyard of Third Times the Charm, Milazzo’s brand new, mostly-pizza restaurant in Red Hook. “You’ll find my diploma sitting on top of the toilet in the bathroom inside.”
So back in 2021, around the time he decided to leave the law for good, Milazzo started putting his energy into baking at his home in Kensington. His focus then was on laminated pastries, and eventually, he brought a tray of croissants to Cobble Hill Park to see if he could sell them. “They were god awful,” Milazzo recalled. “But people were really nice and bought them, and it gave me a little bit of confidence. Like, maybe I can really try this?”
(Photo by Scott Lynch)
A gig at Grimm’s Brewery via a bartender buddy convinced him to switch from pastries to pizza (“People don’t really want a croissant with their beer,” he said), and after a lot of learning and practicing, his pop-up business, Bad Cholesterol, really hit its stride. So much so that when Erin Norris shut down her long-running Grindhaus/Ourhaus space for good, Milazzo took the plunge, and Van Brunt Street got a nifty new neighborhood spot in Third Time’s the Charm.
Spicy marg pizza, $30 (Photo by Scott Lynch)
Milazzo’s Neapolitan-sized sourdough pizzas make up the heart of the menu. The crust is thin, chewy, and firm throughout—no “wet center” situation here—with charred and bulbous edges, and the toppings, as Milazzo put it, “are like painting in primary colors: just bright, punchy, spicy stuff.”
The spicy marg pie is an easy crowd-pleaser, its blanket of tomato sauce dotted with blobs of melted mozzarella, crumbled sweet sausage, and Calabrian chilis. Even better, though, is the vegetarian mushroom supreme, starring thick slices of fried fungi and tons of rosemary strewn over a funky cream sauce. Other pizza choices include a “White Lotus Season 2,” with crushed pistachios, and a “Gowanus Goddess” with extra garlic.
Mushroom supreme pizza, $33 (Photo by Scott Lynch)
The “trademark infringement,” fried onion petals, $14 (Photo by Scott Lynch)
You can also eat not-pizza things at Third Time’s, like the cheekily-named “Trademark Infringement,” a stack of heavily-battered deep-fried onions that mimic Outback’s bloomin’ onion, though with about a quarter of the petals of that notoriously caloric beast—chicken nuggies with a gochu dip, a chicken caesar salad, and a pasta salad with egg, guanciale, and peas round out your options.
Cocktails, including a “Wrong Island Iced Tea” and chai-lada milk punch, run about $15, a pitcher of Modelo is $26, and a glass of the house red will set you back $13. During happy hour, you can knock back as many martinis as you want for twelve bucks each. Milazzo spent months renovating the cozy interior, and it looks pretty spiffy, but the covered backyard gives you more room to spread out.
“I love making pizza,” Milazzo said. “But I want to do other things too. We’re trying to make Third Time’s a Brooklyn-y, pub-ish thing, without overcomplicating it. There’s obviously a lot of great dive bars in this neighborhood, so we’re looking to land somewhere in the middle, like between Red Hook Tavern and Pitts, and Icehouse.”
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