We live in a world where pizza is no longer indulgent enough on its own. A “regular” pizza—apparently, one with good dough, sweet red sauce, stretchy cheese, and toppings—is now just a starting point, a base from which we climb to the excessive and outrageous, the photogenic and the viral. Pizza—sliced, triangular, served on trays, from ovens or taboons? It’s practically a moderate, even balanced meal. In 2025, it seems, even the strictest dietitians will go along with it—especially when you consider the alternatives.
Dolev Elali and Moran Shakuf work in an office with a shower. You could attribute that to hygiene and sterility, to maintaining appearances and professionalism. But it’s safe to assume—and they’ll be the first to admit—that it’s less about craving a master suite at work and more about the need to clean up and refresh during their long workdays. No popping home, barely even a home, and the family already refers to them as “Shabbat Dad,” so if anything—a shower. A shower at the office. Makes perfect sense.
Take those two things—a global obsession with pizza that’s more than pizza, and a personal obsession with pizza that’s way more than pizza—and you get American Dolce.
Dear God, they did it. American Dolce
Five years after Dolce first opened its doors in Ra’anana, it can now be quietly and confidently declared one of the best pizzerias—scratch that, Italian restaurants—in Israel. It began as a guerrilla-style pizza spot, a response to COVID, but developed carefully and consistently to the point where it’s now completely reasonable to dine there without eating any pizza at all. Reasonable, but impossible.
Step by step, improvement after improvement, and instead of resting on their carbohydrate laurels, a new dream was born—or an old one rekindled. Unsurprisingly, it also began with pizza. Also unsurprisingly, it launches into the world with a wave of addictive surprises before it even touches your tongue.
American Dolce opened just weeks ago near its older sibling, around the corner—part parking lot, part lot, part lobby—in a commercial-business center within a classic industrial zone. That’s a long way of saying it’s gray outside and colorful inside, and also a long way of saying that this mixed-use area and the late afternoon opening hours of both places let you arrive calmly, park calmly, and start devouring—not calmly at all.
Inside, the design is deliberately rough, sometimes neon-lit, fully channeling an American eatery. Stairs lead to an interior balcony on the second floor, small bleachers offer a quirky seating twist at ground level, and outside, more casual tables spill onto the sidewalk.
Among the standard street-food elements—self-service and digital ordering screens, for example—some standout decisions shine. There’s a Snickers bar and a whole well-designed merch line, and unintentionally (one assumes), the bathroom entrance is styled like a church confessional. Forgive me, Father, for I am about to sin. Big time.
The menu reflects the bold personalities behind it. It’s not “small” or “tight” by any definition. The only “tightening” you'll need here is for your pants. But it’s also not scattered. A lot of thought went in, a lot of testing—every item placed, tweaked, refined until it couldn't be any more perfect. Though both creators think it still could. That’s not an argument you win outside of therapy.
It starts with an entire lineup of fried items “born in the streets of Italy and immigrated to the United States,” as the place describes it. Full of personality, cheeky, wild. Six appetizers—scratch that, I made myself laugh with the word “appetizers”—not bound by tradition but fiercely loyal to breaking it.
Garlic Bites (NIS 28) are small pieces of pizza dough drenched in butter-garlic-parsley, tossed into a bowl and showered with Parmesan. With a red dip on the side, it’s a near-savage test of self-restraint, certainly beyond the capabilities of the average person.
Cherry Butter Soufflé (NIS 29) are three balls—actually, thick batons—a riff on arancini, with labneh and za’atar on the outside and a volcano of cheese patiently waiting inside.
Frittatina Limone (NIS 33) serves up deep-fried pasta (in tempura, no less) with hazelnut aioli, the kind of thing that makes you rethink every food order you’ve made in Rome and New York alike. Alongside it, there’s a cacio e pepe variation and a fried artichoke with a soft-boiled egg.
What more is there to say, except the obvious—this is all before the pizza. Stay strong.
Dolce’s Neapolitan pizza didn’t make the move here, and rightly so. They built a kitchen that connects to the mother ship, but made a deliberate choice to separate the pizza. They wanted something different. Something more, but also other. Something new—something that’s always been here but could be done better, alongside something that hasn’t arrived yet. In other words: New York, pan, Detroit.
The New York-style pizza is the most familiar—thinner, crispier, very large (and promised to get even larger soon), and available in three versions:
Margherita (NIS 81)
White Potato (cream sauce, gouda, mozzarella, potato slices, green aioli, and green Tabasco, NIS 89)
Crunch-Ranch—an outrageous mix of spicy sauce, cheeses, crispy fried onions, and ranch aioli (NIS 89) that shouldn’t work without stimulants or chemicals, but somehow does. Maybe it’s the attention to every last onion, maybe the sauce isn’t junk. Maybe someone dreamed this up—and knew exactly what they were doing.
The Pan pizza leans into American classics that found success in Israel too. It’s thicker and softer, but not deep-dish (by the way, did “Chicago Pizza Pie Factory” really happen in '90s Tel Aviv or was that just my personal fever dream?). It’s got a bottom crust that went on a long date with olive oil in the oven. Available as:
Margherita (NIS 99)
Black Mushroom (NIS 119)
Spinaci Punch (yogurt, spinach, feta, sumac, NIS 109)
And it clears the boredom bar surprisingly well, even with that dominant dough. It’s just that the dough is dominant and top-quality.
This style also offers:
Margherita (NIS 119)—a monstrous size that could easily feed two summer swim camps.
Pesto Nutz (NIS 129) with whipped ricotta.
Yellow Corn Madness (NIS 139) loaded with roasted mushrooms, corn cream, mushroom aioli, green onion, and truffle oil. Yes, they thought twice about all of that, and then realized—it just works. And it works amazingly. One small rectangle is basically a full meal, and that meal is simultaneously pizza—and the most un-pizza thing you’ve ever had.
American went the extra step with desserts—not just tagging something on, but really going for it.
There’s a Funky Muffin (NIS 18) with built-in peanut butter, white chocolate, and whipped peanut butter cream; a Cinnabon Donut (NIS 21) that’s already drawing people in for it alone; and classic American-style soft serve (NIS 25) that could’ve been a million things, but instead chose to make its own waffle cone—and that won the game. Soft serve, hard win.
That waffle cone seal is also the perfect closure to the American Dolce story, to the Dolce story, and to the story of the people behind it. From the sauces—twelve(!) of them, including a stunning maple aioli—to the effort to identify what cheese actually stars in Detroit itself. From the realization that this place needed a bit more alcohol to the joy of reheating leftovers at home, which might even improve the pizza. From afar, it sounds like a gimmick. But when you arrive, you realize—a gimmick is the only thing this place doesn’t have.
Bottom line, we live in a world where pizza needs to be more than pizza—and where offices have showers. Perfect that these two realities meet in the Ra’anana industrial zone.
American Dolce, 3 Zarchin St., Ra’anana