When it opened in 2022, Shuggie’s Trash Pies + Natural Wine was a prescription for everything that had been ailing us: two years of pandemic-induced illness, shutdowns, economic instability, and social isolation.
We craved joy and connection, excitement and silliness. Shuggie’s captured that zeitgeist with its truck-driver-meets-drag-queen décor, with its voluptuous and cheeky serving dishes, with its throwback ‘80s hand chairs.
Shuggie’s was a symbol of our shift from the 2D, color-drained days of Covid to a world that was once again vivid and bright. It was the Emerald City in our journey through Oz.
Shuggie's co-owners David Murphy and Kayla Abe with their dog Beef(Erin Ng)
The pizza joint captured something else, too: what was then a growing current of climate awareness and movement to find solutions for a broken industrial food system. With their award-winning Ugly Pickle Co., Shuggie’s co-owners chef David Murphy and Kayla Abe had already proven their sustainability cred. With Shuggie’s, they were putting their money where our mouths were, remaking things like offal, dairy byproducts, and veggie scraps into abundant pizzas and snacks.
Things are different now.
While addressing food sustainability and the changing climate continues to be among the most existential challenges facing the globe, shifting political and economic winds in the U.S. have virtually buried the issue beneath false flags, boogeymen, and frivolity. Even big names who had taken serious steps toward reducing their carbon footprint in the early 2020s—New York’s Eleven Madison Park, for example, which moved to a plant-based menu in 2021 that it’s scrapping this fall—are walking back previously made environmental commitments.
But not Murphy and Abe. They’re doubling down.
At the end of August, Shuggie’s Trash Pies + Natural Wine reopened, simply, as Shuggie’s, a climate-positive supper club with a whole slew of creative new dishes that go beyond the pizza format.
“It’s what we imagined the restaurant could be when we first started out,” Abe tells me when I arrive for dinner, greeting me warmly and walking me to a table in the former “Cheetah Room,” which has been re-envisioned as a 1970s Vegas-style dining room with a six-foot-tall naked lady fountain, orange glitter banquettes, and a fresh mural by Abe herself.
Several of Shuggie's new dishes including the crispy fish party (middle) and tuna rib crudo (bottom left)(Erin Ng)
The new menu—still entirely made up of rescued ingredients, sustainable proteins, invasive species, and imperfect produce—is a combination of seasonal California dishes and classic American ones. Some still have the quirkiness of the original menu: the goddess salad comes on skewers poking out from the bare shoulders of a headless bust; the bon bon handy, a dash of peanut butter mousse under a chocolate bon bon, is built on diners’ hands tequila-shot-style and finished with a sprinkle of glitter. But in its new iteration, Shuggie’s is more focused on the dish than the dishes.
Almost three years ago, I called Shuggie’s “f-ing fantastic.” It still is—better even (what’s the next level above f-ing fantastic?), starting with the menu’s “musts” a category, four options that each hit a different flavor profile.
The cacio e pepe pillow, a fluffy, doughy, almost focaccia-like bread slathered in stracciatella cheese and crowned with an egg yolk, is comforting and addictive. The stone fruit and tomato salad with peanut-shallot crunch and herbs is tangy and bright, sweet and sour. The salt cod fish stick 2.0 kind of blows my mind, fried on the outside, creamy on the inside, with a dollop of delicious dill panna cotta and pickled green strawberry. The tuna rib crudo, which Murphy says they hack down to size after getting giant slabs from a vendor who’s already removed what’s sellable, has a thin layer of edible meat dressed with citrus, chilis, and herb-stem aioli.
One of the things I love most about Shuggie’s new menu is that animal products are only occasionally an ingredient and even more rarely the star of the show. One of these stars is the wild boar chop, a lightly breaded cut served with frisée salad and a heat-packing mostarda. Though I do not eat meat, I have to agree with my dining companion that non-factory-farmed invasive species don’t really count—plus, he’s making so many yummy noises it feels disrespectful to the animal not to at least try it. The chop is, indeed, fantastic.
The wild boar chop(Erin Ng)
The crispy fish party is just as good. Tonight, the fish in question is fresh-caught rainbow trout instead of the listed branzino—they take whatever their vendor has enough of to fill their order, says Abe—lightly fried and artfully placed on a bed of bolted collard greens and topped with trout roe. An aioli-like aquafaba brings the whole thing home with a punch of creamy dill.
Something that hasn’t changed is Shuggie’s continued commitment to featuring adventurous natural wines from small producers. Alongside their curated list is an enhanced cocktail menu of low-ABV beverages using the same kinds of scraps and offcuts as their food menu: a vesper infused with dill stems, dill oil, and snap peas; a melon cream made with ugly melons and salted coconut foam.
And don’t worry OG Shuggie’s Trash Pie lovers, they didn’t forget about you. The pizza-only menu returns every Sunday, served to a live jazz soundtrack by musicians with the fair-wage-paying music organization, Jazz In the Neighborhood.
// Shuggie’s is open Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday from 5pm to 9pm, and on Friday and Saturday from 5pm to 10pm; happy hour is 5pm to 6:30pm daily; 3349 23rd St. (Mission), shuggiespizza.com
The former Cheetah Room reimagined with '70s Vegas vibes(Erin Ng)
