In the last five years, Los Angeles has become a mecca of flour, water and salt. It’s impossible to get around most neighborhoods without tripping over a boule of sourdough or a better-than-average croissant. In Pasadena specifically, I am gleefully drowning in a golden sea of laminated dough.
But I find myself putting more miles than I thought possible on my aging Prius whenever the craving for sourdough or an excellent slice of pizza strikes.
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 sweeping views of the Main Channel across the street and of the rainbow shipping containers on Terminal Island. In the evenings, it appears to be the lone source of light on this stretch of South Harbor Boulevard.
You can think of Colossus Harbor as three restaurants in one: a bustling pastry and coffee destination in the early morning hours, with flaky, buttery croissants that fall away in big, delicate shards. A lunchtime destination where diners in suits roll up their sleeves to devour BLT sandwiches, and families fresh off of the latest Princess Cruise to dock at the Port of Los Angeles stop in for chicken Caesar salad sandwiches. In the evenings, couples make googly eyes over bubbly crust pizzas the size of truck tires.
It is the third spinoffof the Colossus Bread bakery that Kristin Colazas Rodriguez opened in San Pedro in 2019. She followed it with a location in Long Beach in 2021. Though she grew up in Long Beach, her father’s job as an elementary school principal in San Pedro meant that 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 the Chori-Man in San Pedro for her first bricks-and-mortar bakery.
Colossus Harbor is more than double the size of the original bakery, with a full restaurant and superette that boasts a rack of grab-and-go bread and shelves lined with pantry products, books, merch and bottles of wine. The focus is still bread, a medium Rodriguez fell in love with in the kitchens at Osteria Mozza and Clark Street Bakery. For a time, she moved to San Francisco to dive even deeper into baking, serving as the bread baker at Outerlands and as the pastry chef at Crenn.
At Colossus Harbor, Rodriguez works with executive chef Jeff Paletz to expand her bread program into something that resembles a full restaurant menu. For breakfast, Rodriguez’s croissant roll is split to cradle an inch-thick cloud of fluffy egg under a melted slice of Muenster cheese. It is one of the finest croissants in Los Angeles, with a pronounced butter flavor and delicate pastry that shatters into the soft eggs.
At lunch, her signature sourdough country bread creates a plush and piquant backdrop to juicy hunks of Mary’s organic chicken thighs coated in lemony Caesar dressing tinged yellow with turmeric.
The lunchtime sandwich that reigns supreme is undoubtedly the mushroom dip, with a tangle of Long Beach oyster mushrooms confited in oil, then roasted until their edges become crisp and curl in the pizza oven. Paletz piles them onto a crusty baguette and buries them in a thick sheet of melted Muenster cheese. He finishes the sandwich by dousing it in a nose-tingling horseradish cream and chives. On the side, there’s a cup of mushroom stock fortified with soy sauce, molasses, rosemary and a touch of cayenne pepper for dunking. Beef dip? Never heard of it. I only have eyes for the spore-bearing fruiting body of fungi drowning in cheese and horseradish cream.
There’s typically at least one salad on offer during lunch and dinner. The Caesar eats like something you might find at the airport, with dry, browning lettuce, big, thick shavings of Parmesan cheese and not nearly enough dressing. Look for the seasonal salad instead. Recently, there was an overflowing plate of wild, peppery arugula with a gardens worth of fresh herbs and colorful flowers tangled with spring peas.
In the evening, the restaurant transitions to an Italian American pizzeria of sorts, where sourdough bread scraps make their way into everything from the meatballs to gnocchi.
The sourdough country bread is used in place of breadcrumbs for extra supple meatballs that bob around in a thick Sunday gravy meaty with shredded braised pork ribs.
Sourdough bread odds and ends are blended with Parmesan, eggs, cream and aromatics to form “gnocchi” bread dumplings with a singular, satisfying crumbly texture.
There’s plenty to snack on while you sip a glass of something from Rodriguez’s short list of mostly natural wines from the Mediterranean region. She favors crisp, bracingly acidic wines from Greece and Slovenia, and aromatic, lusty reds from Croatia. Most of the bottles are priced between $20 to $40, and you can open your wine in the dining room for an extra $10 corkage.
Every wine on the shelf is suitable for 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 spelt, its greatness lies in the chew of the crust, and in its flop. On a scale of zero to 10, its floppability is a whopping 12, with a tip that droops as soon as you lift the slice from the metal pan. I can hear you all screaming. But not only does this texture work, combined with the sharp sourdough tang of the crust, the effect is stunning.
The crust is blanketed in a mixed bag of nearly imperceptible bubbles and big mahogany balloons of dough that collapse at the slightest provocation. It’s breadier than a New York or Neapolitan slice, but pleasantly chewy and puffy, while simultaneously managing to feel light and properly airy. The bubbles are all the crunch that’s needed, with the blistered bits accentuating the toasty, caramelized flavor of the dough. It is the sort of crust you wouldn’t dare leave behind.
If your Tuesday night requires a glistening pepperoni pizza blanketed in enough mozzarella cheese to produce a proper cheese pull, Colossus Harbor delivers. But the seasonal pie, which changes every month or so, is the surprise I look forward to most.
On one visit, the pizza was smeared in a creamy, garlicky white sauce with a smattering of roasted broccoli. The addition of both bagna càuda and lemon zest transformed the simple white pie into a riot of umami. During another dinner, a green garlic and onion pizza tasted like spring in full bloom.
Harbor locals should boast that one of the county’s singularly excellent pizzerias is in their backyard. And for the rest of us, these are pizzas, pastries and sandwiches worthy of a journey to the southernmost tip of Los Angeles.
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