When somebody nails a big presentation at work, dinner gets to be a little fancier than usual.
Caila had just done exactly that, so she got to pick the restaurant. We ended up at Pizzeria Gusto, just north of NW 23rd and Walker in Oklahoma City’s Uptown district. She ordered a glass of red wine, we started ordering food to share, and by the end of the meal we had worked through arancini, a mortadella sandwich, and grilled short rib.
The funny part is that Pizzeria Gusto describes itself as Oklahoma City’s first Neapolitan pizza restaurant.
We did not order pizza.
That sounds like a mistake until the food starts showing up.
Pizzeria Gusto sits at 2415 N. Walker Avenue, inside a commercial building that dates back to 1929. For years, like a lot of older Oklahoma City buildings, the good bones were hidden under later remodels and facade work. When the building was brought back as part of the Uptown redevelopment wave, the older storefront details were uncovered instead of bulldozed.
That matters here because Gusto feels like the neighborhood around it: cleaned up, useful again, but not scrubbed so hard that it loses its age.
Inside, the big visual anchor is the Stefano Ferrara oven, handmade in Naples, Italy. It is the kind of oven you build a restaurant around, and Gusto did. The restaurant uses imported Italian flour and tomatoes for its Neapolitan-style pizzas, the kind with a soft middle, a puffy blistered edge, and enough char to remind you that 900-degree heat is not playing around.
Still, the menu has grown well past pizza. That is what made this dinner work.
Starting with arancini
We arrived during happy hour, which meant we could get a half order of the arancini.
That is a very easy yes.
Gusto’s arancini are fried risotto balls with provolone and roasted red pepper soffritto. The regular order is listed at $14, while the happy-hour half order is $7. They came out crisp on the outside, soft and rich in the middle, and exactly irresponsible enough for a celebration dinner.
Arancini are one of those foods that make a pretty persuasive argument against being practical. Rice, cheese, frying oil. Oklahoma has built entire county fair economies on less.
Happy hour at Gusto runs all day Tuesday and Wednesday, and from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. If you want to sample a few things without turning dinner into a full financial event, that is probably the move.
The fancy sandwich was the point
The Mortadella Panuozzo was the dish I kept coming back to.
Mortadella is the Italian cured sausage from Bologna, basically the much fancier ancestor of American bologna, and Gusto stacks it with basil pesto, fresh mozzarella, red onion, roasted tomato, pistachio, and arugula on pizza bread.
The pizza bread is not a throwaway detail. Even when you skip the pizza, the pizzeria part of the restaurant still shows up. The bread had that chewy, blistered quality that makes the sandwich feel like it belongs there instead of being a menu add-on.
There was a lot going on, but it stayed balanced: salty mortadella, creamy mozzarella, the sharp bite of red onion, pesto, roasted tomato, and pistachios bringing a little crunch. It felt dressed up without becoming precious.
Which, honestly, was the assignment.
Fancy sandwich.
Then the grilled short rib landed and took over the table.
Gusto’s current menu serves the short rib with roasted potato, spinach, roasted corn relish, and red wine sauce. It is listed at $22, and it was the richest thing we ordered. Caila’s red wine made more sense with every bite.
This is where the restaurant stops feeling like “a pizza place with extras” and starts feeling like a real dinner spot. The short rib had enough weight to make the meal feel like a celebration, not just a casual stop before going somewhere else.
And that is probably what I liked most about Pizzeria Gusto.
It can be a nice night out without turning into a stiff fine-dining ceremony. You can sit in a restored Uptown building, order wine and short rib, and still be in a neighborhood restaurant where the table next to you might be splitting a Margherita pizza.
That balance is harder to pull off than people think.
Pizzeria Gusto has now been part of Uptown 23rd for more than a decade, long enough that it is easy to forget how much that stretch of Oklahoma City was changing when it opened. The restaurant brought Neapolitan pizza into the neighborhood, built a menu around that Naples-made oven, and then kept expanding into small plates, sandwiches, mains, cocktails, brunch, and patio dining.
We went because Caila crushed her presentation and deserved a good dinner.
We left having eaten fried risotto balls, mortadella on pizza bread, and short rib with red wine sauce at Oklahoma City’s first Neapolitan pizzeria.
So, yes. I would say we celebrated correctly.
Details
- Address: 2415 N Walker Ave, Oklahoma City, OK 73103
- Phone: (405) 437-4992
- Hours: Monday closed; Tuesday-Thursday 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Friday-Saturday 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sunday 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
- Website: https://pizzeria-gusto.com/
