The best pizzas and bread in San Pedro at the Colossus Harbor restaurant

In the last five years, Los Angeles has become a mecca for flour, water and salt. It's impossible to move through most neighborhoods without stumbling upon a better-than-average sourdough ball or croissant. In Pasadena specifically, I'm happily drowning in a golden sea of ​​laminated dough.

But I find myself putting more miles than I thought possible on my old Prius every time I get a craving for sourdough or a great slice of pizza.

Colossus Harbor opened on Valentine's Day 2025, at the bottom of a luxury apartment complex called Vivo on Harbor in San Pedro. The restaurant's floor-to-ceiling windows offer panoramic views of the main canal across the street and the rainbow shipping containers on Terminal Island. At night, it appears to be the only source of light on this stretch of South Harbor Boulevard.

You can think of Colossus Harbor as three restaurants in one: a lively early-morning pastry and coffee destination, with flaky, buttery croissants falling off in large, delicate shards. A lunchtime destination where suited diners roll up their sleeves to devour BLT sandwiches, and families fresh off the last Princess cruise ship docking at the Port of Los Angeles stop for chicken Caesar salad sandwiches. In the evenings, couples make googly eyes while eating pizzas with bubbly crust the size of truck tires.

It is the third affiliate of the Colossus Bread bakery that Kristin Colazas Rodríguez opened in San Pedro in 2019. She followed with a location in Long Beach in 2021. Although she grew up in Long Beach, her father's job as an elementary school principal in San Pedro meant she was more than familiar with the area. After selling bread and pastries at farmers markets in Long Beach, she chose a 700-square-foot space on Alma Street next to Chori-Man in San Pedro for her first brick-and-mortar bakery.

Colossus Harbor is more than double the size of the original bakery, with a full restaurant and a grocery store that features a bread rack to go and shelves filled with pantry items, books, merchandise and bottles of wine. The focus remains on bread, a medium that Rodriguez fell in love with in the kitchens of Osteria Mozza and Clark Street Bakery. For a time, she moved to San Francisco to delve even deeper into baking, working as a baker at Outerlands and a pastry chef at Crenn.

Colossus Harbor owner and chef Kristin Colazas Rodríguez poses for a portrait at the San Pedro restaurant. (Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times) Colossus Harbor is located on Harbor Boulevard and offers panoramic views of the main canal in San Pedro. (Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times) Colossus Harbor Executive Chef Jeff Paletz in the restaurant. (Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

At Colossus Harbor, Rodriguez is working with executive chef Jeff Paletz to expand their bread program into something resembling a full restaurant menu. For breakfast, Rodriguez's croissant splits to cradle an inch-thick cloud of fluffy egg beneath a slice of melted Muenster cheese. It's one of the best croissants in Los Angeles, with a pronounced buttery flavor and a delicate dough that breaks into soft eggs.

At lunch, their signature sourdough country bread creates a luxurious, tangy backdrop for Mary's juicy chunks of organic chicken thighs topped with turmeric-tinged yellow lemon Caesar dressing.

The reigning lunchtime sandwich is, without a doubt, the mushroom dip, with a tangle of Long Beach oyster mushrooms confit in oil and then roasted until their edges turn crisp and curl in the pizza oven. Paletz piles them on a crusty baguette and buries them in a thick sheet of melted Muenster cheese. Finish the sandwich by drizzling it with a zingy horseradish and chive cream. On the side is a cup of mushroom broth fortified with soy sauce, molasses, rosemary, and a touch of cayenne pepper for dipping. Meat sauce? I've never heard of that. I only have eyes for the spore-bearing fruiting body of mushrooms drowning in cheese and horseradish cream.

At least one salad is usually offered during lunch and dinner. The Caesar eats like something you might find at the airport, with dry, golden lettuce, big, thick shavings of Parmesan cheese, and little dressing. Look for the seasonal salad. Recently, there was a plate brimming with wild, spicy arugula with a garden of fresh herbs and colorful flowers tangled with spring peas.

At night, the restaurant transforms into a kind of Italian-American pizzeria, where leftover sourdough bread makes its way into everything from the meatballs to the gnocchi.

The meatballs in Sunday sauce at Colossus Harbor. They are made with sourdough country bread from the restaurant.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Sourdough country bread is used in place of breadcrumbs for extra soft meatballs balanced in a thick, meaty Sunday sauce with shredded braised pork ribs.

Leftover sourdough bread is mixed with Parmesan, eggs, cream and aromatics to form “gnocchi” bread dough balls with a unique and satisfying crumbly texture.

There's plenty to nibble on while you sip a glass of something from Rodriguez's short list of mostly natural wines from the Mediterranean region. He prefers the crisp, bracing wines of Greece and Slovenia, and the aromatic, vigorous reds of Croatia. Most bottles are priced between $20 and $40, and you can open the wine in the dining room for an additional $10 corkage.

Every wine on the shelf is suited to Rodriguez's pizza dough, which has as many layers and as much character as a one-woman Broadway show. Made with bread flour, hard red spring wheat and spelled, its greatness lies in the chewiness of the crust and its consistency. On a scale of zero to 10, its flexibility is a 12, with a tip that falls off as soon as you lift the slice off the metal tray. I can hear you all screaming. But this texture not only works, but combined with the strong sourdough flavor of the crust, the effect is surprising.

The crust is covered by a mixture of almost imperceptible bubbles and large globes of mahogany dough that collapse at the slightest provocation. It's more bready than a New York or Neapolitan slice, but it's pleasantly chewy and puffy, while still managing to feel light and adequately airy. The bubbles are all the crunch needed, and the blistered bits accentuate the toasted, caramelized flavor of the dough. It's the kind of crust you wouldn't dare leave behind.

One of Colossus Habor's special pizzas. While the restaurant offers a permanent menu of more traditional pies, it offers specialty pizzas that change monthly. They are all made with the restaurant's sourdough.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

If your Tuesday night calls for a glistening pepperoni pizza topped with enough mozzarella to produce an adequate cheese spread, Colossus Harbor delivers. But the seasonal cake, which changes every month or so, is the surprise I look forward to most.

On one visit, the pizza was slathered with a creamy white sauce with garlic and some roasted broccoli. The addition of bagna càuda and lemon zest transformed the simple white cake into a riot of umami. During another dinner, a garlic and onion pizza tasted like spring in full bloom.

Harbor dwellers should boast one of the county's uniquely excellent pizzerias in their backyard. And for the rest of us, it's pizzas, pies, and sandwiches worthy of a trip to the south end of Los Angeles.