RESTAURANT NEWS | ASHEVILLE
A Pizzeria Named for the Man Who Started Asheville’s Beer Scene
Oscar’s Pizza brings thin, charred New Haven-inspired pies to Highland Brewing Company.
OSCAR’S PIZZA | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton
7:12 a.m. ET, Nov. 15, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
The boxes at Oscar’s Pizza come with a joke on them: an illustration of an arm, and the words ‘This side up.’ It’s a nod to Oscar Wong, who carried his very first pizza sideways under his arm at Notre Dame as an 18-year-old and learned the hard way that pizza isn’t meant to be transported like a textbook.
Wong went on to open Highland Brewing Company, Asheville’s first craft brewery, in 1994. The pizzeria that now bears his name had its soft-opening this weekend during the yearly music festival to celebrate the release of the Cold Mountain Winter Ale.
The namesake of Oscar’s Pizza was born in Jamaica to Chinese parents and began brewing in Asheville in the basement of Barley’s. That first subterranean beer he created, Gaelic Amber Ale, remains a mainstay of local taps and helped cement Asheville as as craft beer mecca. Wong died in 2025. His daughter Leah Wong Ashburn, Highland’s president and CEO, runs Highland now, and the pizzeria is the family’s next chapter on the brewery’s 40-acre campus.
Adam Jone and Chris Genua
The pies are thin and charred, New Haven-inspired, with crispy edges, a chewy crust, and blistered char. The 15-inch pizzas are built to feed two. Beyond pizza, the menu runs to salads and shareables like meatballs and soft pretzels, and the flavors take inspiration from Wong’s own heritage. The soft-open menu is shorter: pizza by the slice, a salad, and a dessert. The fuller menu arrives with regular service Thanksgiving week.
Chris Genua leads the concept, a first-generation Italian American from Philadelphia with 12 years in New York pizza. Chef Adam Jones, a Hickory native who trained in Asheville, runs the kitchen. Ordering works the Highland way, at the Taproom bar. Grab a pint and claim a table anywhere on the sprawling brewery campus. Highland texts you when the order is ready, and you pick it up at Oscar’s. Oscar’s serves pies on weekends and select weekdays, with food trucks filling in on the days it doesn’t open.
The details carry Wong through the restaurant. His handwriting inspired the logo script and the “O” in the custom metal door handles. His line “Interested people are interesting people” hangs in the dining room, beside a photo wall of staff eating pizza. “We almost called this place Sideways Pies,” Ashburn said.
Oscar Wong
After this weekend’s soft opening, the grand opening celebration comes in December. It’s a pizzeria built around a man who liked good food and good fun, and a brewery that still runs on the spirit he started with.
This side up
