The moment you walk into Brook & Pines, there is a particular aroma that greets you before anything else. It is the smell of burning pinewood, of scorched stone, and of dough transforming under intense heat. It is the smell of our wood-fired oven, and it has become one of the most recognisable scents in Kasauli.
Pizza is everywhere. You can find it in mall food courts, in delivery boxes, in frozen packets at supermarkets. But Neapolitan pizza — true, wood-fired, 90-second Neapolitan pizza — is a different creature entirely, and finding it at 5,000 feet in the Himalayas is something nobody expected until Brook & Pines opened.
Let us start with the dough, because everything begins there. Our pizza dough is made using a slow fermentation process that takes a minimum of 48 hours. We use a precise ratio of flour, water, salt, and live yeast, and then we let time do most of the work. Slow fermentation develops flavour complexity that fast-proofed dough simply cannot achieve — a mild tanginess, an open crumb structure, and a crust that blisters beautifully under fire without going tough or brittle.
The dough is hand-stretched by our kitchen team, never rolled with a pin. Rolling compresses the air bubbles that fermentation creates. Hand-stretching preserves them, which is why a properly made Neapolitan crust has those characteristic charred bubbles along the cornicione — the outer rim — that tell you it was made with care.
Our wood-fired oven runs at temperatures between 450 and 500 degrees Celsius. At that heat, a pizza cooks in 60 to 90 seconds. The floor of the oven — made of refractory stone — imparts direct heat to the base, creating a crisp bottom that yields just slightly when you fold it. The dome of the oven radiates heat from above, cooking the toppings without drying them out. No conventional oven can replicate this because no conventional oven reaches this temperature or achieves this simultaneous cooking from above and below.
The result is a pizza with a base that is cooked through, a crust that is soft and chewy inside and charred and crisp outside, and toppings that are barely cooked — their freshness and flavour preserved rather than baked into submission.
Our sauce deserves its own paragraph. We use San Marzano-style tomatoes, which have a natural sweetness and low acidity that make them ideal for pizza. The sauce is not cooked before it goes on the pizza. It goes on raw, which means it finishes cooking in those 90 seconds inside the oven, retaining a brightness that cooked sauces lose. A good Neapolitan pizza sauce should taste like summer, like ripe fruit, like something real. Ours does.
On our classic Margherita — which remains our most ordered pizza by a significant margin — the sauce is covered with torn fior di latte mozzarella. The cheese melts unevenly, in pools and strings, and the spots where it caramelises slightly against the stone floor are arguably the best bites on the entire pizza. A handful of fresh basil leaves go on after the pizza comes out of the oven, so they wilt from the residual heat rather than burn inside it.
For guests who want to explore beyond the Margherita, our menu offers several signature options. Our mountain mushroom pizza features wild mushrooms foraged from the surrounding forests, layered over a white garlic and cream base with truffle oil and fresh thyme. Our spiced lamb pizza uses slow-cooked local mutton, caramelised onions, and a harissa-spiced tomato sauce that brings heat and warmth in equal measure — particularly satisfying on cold Kasauli evenings.
There is a vegetarian pizza loaded with seasonal vegetables from local farms — roasted bell peppers, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, and a generous hand of fresh herbs — that our vegetarian guests return to again and again. And there is a four-cheese pizza that is precisely as indulgent as it sounds.
We are asked frequently why we chose to specialise in Neapolitan pizza rather than the more familiar thick-crust or processed-cheese versions common in Indian restaurants. The answer is simple: we believe Kasauli deserves real pizza. The hill station has a heritage of good taste, of people choosing authenticity and natural beauty over convenience. Our pizza is an extension of that ethos.
Eating a wood-fired Neapolitan pizza at Brook & Pines is an experience rather than just a meal. You hear the crackle of the fire. You watch the oven glow orange against the stone. Your pizza arrives blistered and fragrant, and for a few minutes, you could be in Naples — except the view out the window is of pine forests and Himalayan valleys, which is arguably even better.
Come hungry. Share a pizza. Order another. You will understand what we mean by the first bite.
