Smoke It in Hop Bottom, PA: A Small-Town BBQ Pizza Discovery Worth the Drive

I walked in, ordered, paid the bill, and reviewed the pizza like every other customer. No heads-up. No comps.

This review started with overhearing a stranger doing something good, and following the trail.

I was doing my Saturday morning pizza-supplies shop at Orlando Foods in Scranton when I overheard a conversation about a local business owner running a fundraiser for two local teenagers who had suffered a major tragedy. I didn’t catch the man’s name — he was already on his way out — so I asked Orlando’s owner who he was, and I tracked the story down.

That trail led me to Smoke It in Hop Bottom. I found the fundraiser on their Facebook page. Within a few days, I had ordered four pizzas from the shop for the whole family. And this review — a pizza I’d already been meaning to get to since early 2026, when locals started messaging me about it — jumped straight to the top of the list.

Because when I hear about a small-business owner using his own platform to help two local kids through the worst chapter of their young lives, I don’t want to write a review. I want to shine a spotlight. And the pizza itself turned out to be genuinely good news.

Setting the Scene: Smoke It on Main Street in Hop Bottom

Hop Bottom is a tiny borough in Susquehanna County, tucked into the northern edge of NEPA — the kind of small town where Main Street is genuinely the center of the community. Smoke It sits right on that Main Street, sandwiched between Blacks Country Store and the Post Office.

It’s a relatively new operation with a smart dual identity: a mobile BBQ food truck and smoker running catering and events, plus a brick-and-mortar restaurant serving BBQ, pizza, stromboli, hoagies, salads, and more. Inside, there’s a small counter with a few stools; out front, a couple of tables give you a great view of everything happening on Main Street. During my visit, the shop hummed with regulars being greeted by name. That’s a small-town restaurant doing something right.

The Order

Family style. Four pies for four pizza-loving people:

• Buffalo Chicken Pizza with blue cheese on the side
• BBQ Brisket Pizza with Sriracha Mayo Drizzle
• Personal Pepperoni Pizza for the Pizza Prince
• Gluten-Free Cauliflower Crust Pizza for the First Lady of NEPA Pizza

The Crust: A Sturdy, Golden-Brown, Screen-Baked Canvas

The three regular pies all shared the same crust, and it deserves its own moment. Smoke It’s crust is a New York style build — round, sturdy, dense, chewy, and satisfying. Baked on a screen to a beautiful golden brown, with a really nice bottom crisp and a super flavorful, even slightly-greasy indulgent character. It’s exactly the crust you want under a heavy specialty pizza: it doesn’t collapse, it holds everything the kitchen throws at it, and it still delivers a satisfying chew.

The First Lady’s pie was on a standard prefab cauliflower crust — a solid GF option, and it’s a good thing they carry one at all. I’m judging the shop primarily on the three regular pies.

The Buffalo Chicken Pizza: A New Favorite in the Category

I’ve eaten a lot of buffalo chicken pizzas over the years. Smoke It’s version surprised me.

The chicken is prepared like the meat on a chicken cheesesteak — sliced and chopped into pleasantly meaty pieces, evenly coated in sauce, generously applied. Not massive chunks that fall off the pie. Not sawdust crumbles that disappear into the cheese. The perfect size — every bite gets chicken, sauce, cheese, and crust together. That’s a small technical detail most shops miss.

The wing sauce was the star of the show — and not what I expected. Only mildly spicy, a little smoky (you can taste the connection back to the smoker), and loaded with pleasant, complex flavor rather than one-note vinegar-and-hot-pepper heat. Once I put the optional blue cheese over the top, it all came together in a way I sincerely, genuinely enjoyed. The pie was generously cheesed with just a slight sauce layer beneath. This is one of the best buffalo chicken pizzas I’ve eaten in NEPA.

The BBQ Brisket Pizza with Sriracha Mayo Drizzle: A Flavor Bomb Worth Driving For

Now the pie that put Smoke It on my map. The BBQ brisket pizza was outrageously packed with flavor.

The brisket is real, honest, house-smoked brisket — shredded and applied generously — smoky, tender, and carrying a little of that beef-jerky character in the best possible way. This is the difference between a shop that “does BBQ pizza” and a shop that actually smokes its own meat. You can taste it on the first bite.

The house-made spicy Texas-style BBQ sauce is the standout — a little spicy, thick, bold, smooth, and delicious in a way that made me want to buy a bottle to take home. Not a squeeze-bottle warmup. A real, thoughtfully-made sauce. Layer in the optional Sriracha mayo drizzle and everything shifts higher — smoke, spice, creamy tang, sweet-hot barbecue, real beef, and that golden-brown screen-baked crust holding it all together. An absolute flavor bomb.

This is worth driving to Hop Bottom for. You can taste the quality of the smoked brisket and the creativity of the house-made sauces. There’s a lot going on and none of it is over the top — a very hard balance to hit.

Pizzaiolo’s Notes 🍕

• A real BBQ kitchen making a BBQ pizza is a fundamentally different product than a pizza shop trying to do BBQ pizza. Smoker infrastructure, sauce-making chops, meat-handling — it all shows up on the pie.
• The chicken-cheesesteak-style prep on the buffalo chicken pizza is a masterclass in specialty pizza construction. More shops should study this.
• A sturdy screen-baked crust is the correct engineering answer to a heavy specialty program. You can’t build a real BBQ brisket pizza on a floppy soft crust.
• Two standout house-made sauces plus a smart wing sauce is a very strong sauce program for a small Main Street shop.

The Man Behind the Counter

I don’t know the owner of Smoke It personally, and I never met the man whose fundraiser I overheard about at Orlando Foods. But I know this: the owner of a very small Main Street pizza shop in a tiny NEPA borough took his own platform and used it to help two local teenagers through one of the worst chapters of their young lives. That’s not marketing. That’s not PR. That’s who this business is. And the pizza — the smoker, the sauces, the way the regulars are greeted at the counter — matches every ounce of that character.

That’s the kind of pizza story I got into this to tell.

Final Thoughts

Smoke It on Main Street in Hop Bottom is a small-town Northeastern PA pizza and BBQ operation punching well above its weight. The buffalo chicken is one of the best I’ve had in NEPA. The BBQ brisket with Sriracha mayo is a genuine destination pizza. The screen-baked crust is a real canvas. The house-made sauce program is legit. And the community-first character of the shop makes every dollar spent there feel like a good dollar spent.

If you’re anywhere in the Susquehanna County / Nicholson / Hop Bottom / Montrose corridor — do yourself the favor and make the trip. Order the BBQ brisket. Order the buffalo chicken. Watch a little Main Street from the tables out front. This is what small-town NEPA pizza should be about.

What I’d Order Next Time

• BBQ Brisket Pizza with Sriracha Mayo — again. Once was enough to know it deserves a second visit.
• The BBQ platter and sides — I want to see the smoker program on its own.
• A stromboli — the crust will translate beautifully.

My Takeaways

• 🍕 A small Main Street shop with real community heart
• 🔥 Real house-smoked brisket — you taste it on the BBQ pie
• 🍕 Sturdy, screen-baked, golden-brown NY-style crust — perfect for heavy specialty pies
• 🐔 Chicken-cheesesteak-style buffalo chicken prep — perfect size, evenly sauced, easy to eat
• 🌶️ Smoky, flavor-forward wing sauce that leans complexity over heat
• 🎯 House-made spicy Texas-style BBQ sauce + Sriracha mayo = flavor bomb worth traveling for
• 🫶 A community-first owner running fundraisers for local families in crisis
• 🍕 One of the best buffalo chicken and BBQ brisket pizzas I’ve eaten in NEPA

Have you been to Smoke It in Hop Bottom? What’s your favorite pie on their menu? Drop your recommendations in the comments.

Pizza is Similar to:

• The crust gives me Pizza Bella and Mama Mia Pizza vibes.
• Sturdy screen-baked crusts engineered specifically for heavily-topped specialty pies

Rating Table

A quick note before the table: the writeup above is my gut read from the visit. The scorecard below is my technical scoring on the standard six-category rubric — locked in 24 hours later. Both are honest.

Gut Ranking (in the moment)

1. BBQ Brisket Pizza with Sriracha Mayo Drizzle — the pie I would drive back to Hop Bottom for
2. Buffalo Chicken Pizza — one of the better I’ve had in NEPA, gotta add the bleu cheese
3. Personal Pepperoni Pizza — a solid, honest benchmark
4. Gluten-Free Cauliflower Crust Pizza — a good option to have on the menu

Technical Scorecard

Gut ranking and technical scorecard agreed exactly — which usually means the flavors and construction were consistent all the way through. The story of these scores is Taste driving the results: the BBQ Brisket earned a 9.1 in Taste and 8.1 in Sauce — elite-tier numbers that reflect a real smoker meeting a real house-made BBQ sauce. The Buffalo Chicken followed with an 8.2 in Taste, driven by that standout wing sauce and chicken-cheesesteak prep. Cheese was rock-consistent at 7.4 across all three regular pies — a great sign of a kitchen doing the same thing well over and over. I stand by my gut ranking of what I enjoyed most in the moment, and I stand by the technical scores I locked in 24 hours later.

Smoke It
Main Street, Hop Bottom, PA · Susquehanna County
Between Blacks Country Store and the Post Office
Mobile BBQ food truck + smoker · Catering · Events · Brick-and-mortar restaurant serving BBQ, pizza, stromboli, hoagies, salads, and more

Speaking of great sauce — Smoke It’s house-made spicy Texas-style BBQ sauce and their smoky wing sauce are two of the most flavorful house-made pizza sauces I’ve come across in NEPA this year. See how they stack up against the rest of the field in our NEPA Pizza Review coverage. And if you’re building pizza at home, our Amazon affiliate picks are linked on the site — every click helps keep NEPA Pizza Review independent and ad-light.