Roberta’s Pizza Marina Bay Sands

Roberta’s Pizza, a renowned Brooklyn-based pizzeria, best known for serving wood-fired, Neapolitan-style pizzas. Established in 2007 in Bushwick, New York, it gained a cult following, including celebrities like Beyoncé and Jay-Z. They opened its first international outlet at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. Let’s take a dinner dine-in today at Roberta’s Pizza restaurant right here in Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands mall.

Roberta’s Pizza Singapore branch offers a 40-seat, fast-casual restaurant operating on a walk-in basis. The restaurant does not accept reservations, so be prepared for potential wait times during peak hours. Interestingly, during my visit, the restaurant interior features vibrant pop art by artists Andre Tan and Jason Woodside. It creates a lively atmosphere.

Also, there is an offering of tabled seated lined along the walls as well as high table bar-style seating center of the restaurant. There is also ample space with a mix of more private tabled sitting or high bar sitting facing the open kitchen area. Here, you can also find walls filled decked with shades of white and red with an assortment of photo mural montages.

A spectacle open kitchen layout

On Roberta’s menu is pure Italian, comprising of an offering of pizzas, bread, pastas and premium grill dishes. Still, the place at its core is a pizza establishment and be the focus of this dine-in dinner review. You can’t scream pizza enough without emphasizing a large Pavesi wood-fired oven, sitting center stage in the restaurant. Here you can find packed with sacks of wood logs all around it. A flame can be seen burning over a few logs of wood inside the oven itself.

Notably, all pizzas, breads and some cooked food are all prepared using traditional wood fired stove. The oven is manned by a single “oven master” who takes charge and controlling the time each item takes inside the oven as well. Interestingly, the oven is well ventilated and not smokey despite the oven located inside the air-conditioned restaurant.

Moreover, the dining experience is casual and lively, with the open kitchen layout. Also, the bar seating for your pizzas offers a good view of the central open kitchen where all pizzas are assembled and your pasta cooked on the spot too. You can literally see your pizza dough laid, hand assembled with ingredients from the counter before popping into the wood-fired oven. It does add to the entertainment value.

Wall murals

Menu selections

A slice of life

Brooklyn-style pizzas on the menu

Furthermore, Roberta’s is celebrated for its wood-fired Neapolitan-style pizzas. Recommended restaurant highlight pizzas includes their signature New York famous original ($30). This Brooklyn-style 12-inch wood-fired pizza is served with generous toppings of spic calabrese salami and chilli. It creates a harmonious blend of sweet, spicy, and savoury flavours, yet sitting on a really razer-thin pizza base and crust which is not oily. As the slices are so thin, folding them in by hand to eat them is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

Additionally, another recommended variant of this be their Famous Original ($27). You can’t go wrong with their Famous Original pizza. It is a popular and classic staple margherita pizza is enhanced with chili, parmesan, and caciocavallo cheese. It offers a delightful twist on a traditional favourite. All the pizzas are of a single standard 12” diameter size. This despite being a more toned down and cheaper variant of their New York famous original.

Moreover, their Pina Koala pizza ($30) is a take on the Hawaiian pizza. It is a staple offering with parmigiano, mozzarella, caciocavallo, pineapple and prosciutto cotto. You can taste the cheeses which forms the layered base for most of their pizza offerings.

Also, they are made out of predominantly two types of cheese, caciocavallo a semi-hard, stringy Italian cheese, typically made from cow’s milk, known for its unique gourd-like shape and rich flavour. While parmigiano is a hard, granular, and aged Italian cheese, also known as “the King of Cheeses. These offerings showcase the diverse and flavourful offerings here at Roberta’s Pizza, a good mix.

Unconventional pizzas

Furthermore, Speckenwolf ($30) simple white pizza topped with paper-thin slices of smoky cured speck. The speck is the highlight here which is really thinly sliced to the level of “almost-flakes”. It does add a unique texture to the pizza, which is well layered with mozzarella and topped with mushroom, with dashes of red onion, oregano and black pepper to top up the colours.

Also, other miscellaneous and less popular, albeit, more expensive kitchen offerings include their Wood-roasted Tiger Prawns ($30) and Australian Black Angus Picanha steak at $78 (300g with level 5 marbling) served with roasted potatoes and green. Though this is probably not what you should go for here.

Pretty good value

Moreover, pizzas are not the only best dough here, I would recommend their House Bread with Cultured Butter ($9) as a starter with your pizzas. It is a nice paring with the thick crusty bread. This unique offering presents a large, hollow dome of dough, perfect for sharing and pairing with the smooth, luscious butter.

Also, the bread does resemble a pocked marked dough dome when served, having similarly gone through the wood-oven treatment like their pizzas. I found the cultured butter savoury. This is unlike regular butter and has a salty flavoured taste which melts when being spread onto your baked bread, so that’s what cultured butter is.

Additionally, I found the pizzas on the light side, with a thin hollow crust which does not make you too full like most doughy pizza. This is attributed largely for Roberta emphasize on more ingredients, cheese and. It does leaves you craving for more of their pizzas. Still, it does not give you an impression of being short-changed. This is contrary to most American style pizzas with a much thicker and filling crust, including those we had previously at Yellow cab pizzas and even the ultra-filling. If Roberta’s is too light for those looking for a more filling pizzas, John’s Pizzeria as an alternative serving large deep-dish pizzas bound to make you overly full.

Wrapping up

Lastly on prices, despite located in an upmarket mall here at Marina Bay Sands, I found the prices here pretty affordable. A pizza here would set you back a range from S$20 to S$29 for their standard one-size only 12-inch pizzas. This considered reasonable for the Marina Bay Sands locality, where meals typically cost upwards a of $50/pax as the norm.

With 3 pizzas, you can feed about 4 pax costing about $35/pax including tax. Roberta’s is also notably a cashless restaurant and accepts all cashless payments including credit cards, and outer e-payments and NETs.

All in all, that wraps up our dine-in at Roberta’s Pizza. They offer tasty flavourful and light pizzas without breaking the bank, in a pretty chill and cool neighbourhood. Roberta’s is located at B1-45/46 Galleria Level, at the The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands. Interestingly, it is in the same mall where we also previously visited Black Tap burgers and Gordon Ramsey bread street kitchen restaurants, all located under the one same roof.

This review is not sponsored by the establishment nor did they provide any editorial input or reimbursements into the content and outcome of this review. All meals were paid for in full out of my own pocket as a regular and anonymous patron.