The Evolution of New York-Style Slices and Pies

Call me biased, but New York is the most dynamic city in the world when it comes to pizza. Waves of Italian immigrants, our city’s hustle culture, updates in oven technology, and the influence of the cheffy era have led to the evolution and diversification of one of the city’s most famous meals.

New York-style pizza is one of the city’s few iconic foods that many of us judge in relation to what we ate in our childhood — critical faculties out the window. Some of us go for a thin sheen of sweet tomatoes and a blanket of mozzarella. Others insist on a savory tomato, flecked with Italian oregano and a smattering of (browned) cheese. One contingent likes a chewy crust that’s firm enough to fold. Another looks for a crust that’s leopard-spotted at the bottom — the list goes on.

Pizza in New York is so iconic that, similar to Italians and their staunch food rules by region, aficionados have attempted to establish a set of unwritten rules as to what makes “the best” — a little unusual in a city, not to mention country, that prizes innovation, especially when it comes to food. And yet, “the rules” are admittedly flexible, based on the age of the rule-maker, where they’d grown up, and their favorite pizzerias.

As the case has been in the famous pizza city of Naples — where the Lombardi’s founders are from — pizza has evolved from a blue-collar food to one that’s enjoyed by people across socioeconomic backgrounds, notes Marlena Spieler, in her book, A Taste of Naples: Neapolitan Culture, Cuisine, and Cooking.

Though pizza was around before it came to New York, let’s say for our purposes that New York-style pizza is its own thing that entered the city’s food lexicon well over 100 years ago. Since then, pizza-makers all around the city have been tweaking recipes, changing up ovens, and swapping in new ingredients. The result? While New York pizza — and its offspring, the New York slice — is always recognizable, an old-school versus a new-school pie is, for pizza fanatics, like comparing apples to oranges.

With the help of some of the city’s most knowledgeable pizza folks, we’re laying out a celebration of four stages in the evolution of New York pizza — all of which are still available at shops around the city.

The coal-oven pie started it all

The coal-oven pie is a precursor of the New York slice, with origins, according to lore, at Lombardi’s on Spring Street back in the early 1900s, perhaps earlier. It’s the locus for a style that, due to super high heat, says Daniel Young, author of Where to Eat Pizza: The Last Word on the Slice, sports a smokiness, along with a drier, leopard-charred crust on the undercarriage and the cornicione — or as critic Robert Sietsema and the late Jonathan Gold call it, “the bone.” In short, coal-fired pizza establishes the baseline.

Scott Wiener, of Scott’s Pizza Tours and the founder of Slice Out Hunger, has his own observations about the classic New York style: The dough — flour, salt, water, and yeast — is perhaps the most dense of the evolutions of New York pizzas we’re talking about here. As for toppings, it’s “simple, unseasoned tomato and mozzarella, and that’s it,” he says.

Places that show off this older style include Arturo’s on West Houston, Patsy’s in East Harlem, and John’s of Bleecker Street. Around since 1929, from Giovanni “John” Sasso, John’s first opened on Greenwich and moved to 278 Bleecker Street, at Jones Street. Sasso ran his business until he sold the place to the Vesce Brothers in 1954, according to the website. Augustine “Chubby” Vesce bought the business from his brothers, and continued to own and operate John’s of Bleecker Street until he died in 1984. Today, it’s owned by Peter Castellotti Jr. and Robert Vittoria.

When visiting John’s, you still have to order a whole pie. Graffiti-carved walls frame the interior, while the booths have recently been replaced. John’s still offers a throwback-style, 14-inch or 16-inch “John’s Classic” pizza in the original with tomato and mozzarella; the Sasso, with Parmesan, oregano, and black pepper; or the margherita, with fresh basil. Want a glass of Chianti with that? Order one poured nearly to the rim and feast in a booth.

Bakers Pride ovens change the game

The invention of the gas deck-oven — ovens like Bakers Pride, which came out of the Bronx in the mid-1940s — is essential to the evolution of the New York pizza. This is when we started seeing the proliferation of pizza sold by the slice.

“[The slice] is flexible. It’s portable. And it’s an icon for New York becoming a famous pizza city,” says Wiener of pizza in this era. He describes the style as “crispy and chewy at the same time,” one-eighth of a large, sharable pie, with each slice bigger than the paper plate it’s served on. “Reheating is built into the style,” he says, to which Carlo Mirarchi, co-founder of Roberta’s in Bushwick, confirms.

“The evolution of New York-style pizza is really about technology,” says Mirarchi. This next-level pizza is cooked at a lower temperature, say 500 to 700 degrees, as opposed to 900 degrees or more for coal-fired pizza. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the slice grew in popularity beyond the earlier coal-fired era.

Joe’s Pizza (7 Carmine Street, at Sixth Avenue) from Joe Pozzuoli open since 1975 and also in the Village, is “the quintessential New York slice… big, floppy, foldable, [that] glistens with a sheen of oil,” writes Wiener on his site. There are a million examples of this style, including places like John’s Pizzeria in Elmhurst since 1960; Luigi’s in Park Slope since 1973, and more.

Opening the floodgates in the wood-fired era

In the late 1990s through the aughts, two evolutions pushed people’s expectations for pizza. One is New York’s wood-fired Neapolitan pie, ushered in by pizza-makers like Anthony Mangieri, who had his own rules for his shop, including no substitutions. Mangieri has opened several iterations of his lone pizzeria, but it started as Una Pizza Napoletana, first in the 1990s in New Jersey, later in New York in 2004, after which it moved to San Francisco, then back to New York, where it remains today. Other pizza shops adhere more strictly to the VPN rules for making Neapolitan pizzas, established in Italy in 1984 (00 or single-O flour, max to 35 cm diameter, San Marzano or similar plum tomatoes, sparse toppings), such as Michael Ayoub, who opened Fornino in 2004. Roberto Caporuscio, a Neapolitan evangelist, opened Kesté in New York in 2009. His daughter Giorgia Caporuscio carries the torch and is this year’s pizzaiolo of the year from Italy’s 50 Top Pizza for her pizza at Don Antonio.

With the rise of wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas, known for soft crust and fior di latte or buffalo mozzarella (less industrial cheese than what is often used for gas-oven pizzas), New York customers were guided back toward the whole-pie style of ordering. In addition, they had to get used to spending a bit more on pizza, were groomed to seek out higher-quality toppings, and began to expect wines by the glass that were more interesting than, say, the house red.

But it was Roberta’s (261 Moore Street, at Bogart Street), which opened in Bushwick in 2008, that made pizza a lifestyle and a fashion, notes Wiener. While Roberta’s embraced the of-the-moment, wood-fired baking, it tossed away rules when it came to ingredients.

“Roberta’s is a gateway to what we accept for pizza: how they’re topped and what we’ll spend,” says Wiener. The crust is charred; like the Neapolitan style, they’re using “good tomatoes,” perhaps lightly salted. It’s at this moment, notes Wiener, when it becomes acceptable for each person at a table to eat their own pie.

Yet the Roberta’s founder noted that the choice in style was shaped by wanting to bring back the communal nature of eating pizza — like at Grimaldi’s and Patsy’s — that is less of a priority in a typical New York slice shop. “We wanted to have sit-down pizzas in the middle of the table, offering slices that everyone could grab,” he says.

In a review titled “Artisanal-Everything Roberta’s Defies the Stereotypes,” former Eater critic Ryan Sutton notes Roberta’s transformation from “a pizza parlor” into “one of New York’s most quintessential kitchens,” as much for the pizza as the rest of the menu. Roberta’s is a style he defines as “a stunning New York-Neapolitan hybrid, without that soupy center,” where, even with novel toppings combinations, “The margherita pizza tastes like it should — a tightrope balance of tangy tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil.”

Roberta’s continues to pioneer New York pizza styles, even as others innovate beyond them. Earlier this year, Roberta’s segued to the world of a slice shop, opening R Slice, next door to its Bushwick flagship, where it’s using the same dough to turn out something new for the brand. Here, it’s the Bakers Pride-style slice, with new combinations like the Bee Sting with honey, and the Fire and Ice (stracciatella with ’nduja). And just last month, the brand opened its first location in Manhattan, a two-in-one R Slice and Roberta’s in the newly revamped Pennsylvania Plaza at 33rd Street.

The dawn of new-wave pizza

This brings us to our current new-wave era: not entirely driven by wild ingredient combinations or bulbous balls of burrata on pies — though there’s that, too. Pizza has diversified, with New Yorkers wanting more styles, more surprise toppings, more cultural mash-ups, and more attention to the crust-as-good-as-fancy-bread.

A bakery movement has helped fuel current tastes, with customers better understanding that more than half of what makes for good pizza is in the flour, the fermentation style, and hydration of the dough, much like bread. The type of oven makes a difference, too, whether it’s made in the increasingly popular electric ovens, gas ovens, or wood-fired ovens (with coal ovens on the way to extinction).

With the opening of places around 2015 like L’Industrie in Brooklyn and Scarr’s (35 Orchard Street, at Hester Street) from Scarr Pimentel — with its in-house milled flour — people’s expectations for New York pizza have leveled up.

This era is also intentional with ingredients, says Wiener. “What’s interesting is that new-wave pizza has trickled down to old-school slice shops,” he says, that are in turn diversifying their offerings. Wiener notes places like Mama’s Too (that Pete Wells in the Times called “a genetically modified pizza”) and the ’90s-themed Upside Pizza as examples of these pies.

Even those updating the pizza of their childhood is considered new wave, with upgraded ingredients and newer digs. One example is Chrissy’s Pizza, the late-night, reservation-only whole pie destination in the back of Superiority Burger in the East Village (with a soon-to-open standalone location). It’s one of the most challenging pizzas to get in the city, made by Chris Hansell, who used to sell a set number of pizzas a night out of his Bushwick apartment, starting in 2022. His pizzas, made with “good tomatoes,” oregano, pecorino Romano before the bake, and Grana Padano on the finish, offer a crisp crust for a well-done slice that slightly droops at the tip.

“My inspiration for pizzas are the places my father took me,” he says, citing a few pizzerias in Queens as well as where he grew up in Valley Stream on Long Island. “There’s a certain flavor that it used to taste like that’s a little different from what slice shops serve now.”