A slice of pie: meet New York's pizza new wave

Goopy burrata blobs melting into a fresh-from-the-oven slice, taut crusts rendered tangy from long fermentations, blankets of opaque orange vodka sauce, drizzles of chili-infused honey–just a handful of the hallmarks of a minor, though mighty brigade of both self-taught and seasoned pizzaioli reimagining the classic New York-style slice and not only.

Pizza is as New Yorkian as the Statue of Liberty, taking root in the city’s foodways shortly after Lady Liberty’s 1886 unveiling. Scott Wiener, a pizza historian and founder of Scott’s Pizza Tours, categorizes the city’s pizza history into two eras, starting with the early 20th-century coal oven institutions like the still-standing Lombardi’s, named for Gennaro Lombardi, the long-presumed pioneer who started peddling pies at his drug store turned pizzeria in 1905, and Giovanni ‘John’ Sasso’s John’s of Bleecker in 1919.

The invention of the gas oven in 1934 achieved the unachievable: reheating pre-baked pies without solidifying the crusts, prompting the profusion of slice joints that characterized the second half of the 20th century. Joe Pozzuoli opened Joe’s Pizza in 1975, home today to what Wiener considers the quintessential New York slice. His criteria? Consistency, reliability, and speediness–constants at the two locations he’s frequented for over 20 years. “It’s dependable,” he asserts. “The staff is always the same, and there’s not a lot of options. It’s simple. The ingredients all go on before the bake, and there are no extra operational steps. It’s tomatoes, mozzarella, oven, and done.”

Those extra operational steps are part of what distinguishes the new wave from the old school. Like burrata. Tuscany-born Massimo Laveglia goes through so much of the milky cheese that he has it delivered daily from Connecticut to place atop the estimated 2,500 burrata slices he sells weekly at the Williamsburg and West Village outposts of L’Industrie.

Laveglia crossed the pond in 2014 to pursue Italy’s national sport stateside. “I was like, soccer probably sucks in America, so I should go play there,” he chuckles. “But it didn’t happen, so I started working in a restaurant.”

While waiting tables in Soho, he learned of a New York-style pizzeria for sale in Williamsburg and convinced the skeptical owner to sell it to him despite his inexperience. He acquired the shop on a Friday in 2017 and assumed kitchen duty on Monday, deploying his predecessor’s recipe until he gradually perfected the 72-hour, cold-fermented dough for the wafer-thin crust that put his pizza on the map.

“I’m not a fan of Neapolitan pizza,” admits Laveglia. “So, I wanted to do something similar to New York-style because I like the crunchiness and profile of the pizza.” As by-the-slice culture didn’t factor into his Italian upbringing, his affinity for his adopted city’s wasn’t intertwined with nostalgia. Instead, after settling into Williamsburg, he regularly observed the local rite at Carmine’s, a beloved Graham Avenue joint that opened in 1970.

“What we do differently is we don’t have a showcase filled with pre-made pies with toppings,” explains Laveglia. “We have a five-minute total bake time. We pre-bake red and white dough bases for four minutes and finish them on the spot with made-to-order toppings, then bake them for one more minute, so everything is really fresh.”

Paul Giannone also wasn’t motivated, at least not initially, by nostalgia when he got the idea for Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop—he just wanted to prepare pizzas that traveled better than Paulie Gee’s wood-fired Neapolitans. ”Once I got going, though, I realized that I had an opportunity to pay homage to the slice shops of my youth in Brooklyn.”

His pizzeria, which opened in 2018, exudes once-upon-a-time charm from every angle: dark wood paneling, orange booths, a vintage Coca-Cola machine, and a 1960s soul and R&B soundtrack on full blast. “It was my goal to replicate those shops that I went to in the 1960s and 1970s, including their offerings,” says Giannone. “As much as possible, I tried to offer the type of toppings that were available back then with a few exceptions.”

His crisp crusts, which undergo a 48-hour fermentation, bolster his signature Hellboy, or pepperoni finished with the Brooklyn-made chili-infused Mike’s Hot Honey. Laveglia also drizzles the condiment post-bake over prosciutto and ricotta at L’industrie, and Scarr Pimentel mingles it with beef pepperoni and jalapenos for the Hotboi at his namesake Lower East Side shop.

The vodka pie couples fresh and aged mozzarella with vodka sauce, a spiked cream-and tomato-based Staten Island pizzeria staple that cameos at the new wavers. Laveglia completes L’Industrie’s with capocollo, Pimentel finishes Scarr’s with a green pesto swirl, and Frank Tuttolomondo embellishes his with pepperoni rounds at Mama’s Too, the only slice joint in the city with a star rating from the New York Times.

Giannone’s Freddy Prinze, an airy Sicilian supported by a crunchy sesame-seed bottom, pays tribute to the trademark square of Freddy’s, a Whitestone mainstay since 1961. He also procured a topping indisputably absent from the menu boards at his boyhood haunts: vegan mozzarella, an option that lets him “stay as true to New York-style pizza as possible” for dairy abstainers.

At Brooklyn DOP, Thomas Ardito combines dairy-free mozzarella with tomato sauce, basil, and Sicilian oregano for a vegan take on the popular Giusepp' round pie. Ardito, a Brooklynite and gym owner, wasn’t a novice when he started selling pizza on Instagram to pay his rent during lockdown–he had worked the line at neighborhood pizzerias during and after high school. In 2018, he started dabbling in advanced techniques for fun and, coincidentally, completed an expert-led masterclass a week before the pandemic struck. His best friend Jason D'Amelio joined him for the lockdown enterprise, and Brooklyn DOP was born two years later. The 96-hour fermented dough “is the star,” declares Ardito, an unvarying base for various round and Sicilian squares as well as a style that strikes a sentimental chord for Italian Americans: grandma. The springy square is inspired by the ‘pizza’ nonna would improvise from leftover bread dough and her comforting homemade red sauce. Other new wavers like Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop, L’Industrie, and Scarr’s feature grandmas, and Brooklyn DOP’s is layered with fresh Wisconsin mozzarella and a slather of garlic confit tomato sauce.

Ardito’s current repertoire is a far cry from his earlier gigs, and he cringes when he reflects on the practices in play at some of the more standardized joints: “high gluten flour that’s been bleached, primed, thrown in a planetary mixer, beaten for 20 minutes, overmixed, cold stretched.”

He’s come a long way and is determined to take a stand. “When you know better, then you’re obligated to do better,” he posits. “We have an agenda, a core value of the relentless and intelligent pursuit of pizza.”

He and D’Amelio take this philosophy so much to heart that they’re launching an “elite pizza-making school” next year along with Fast Life, a less-Italian, more New York-esque venture showing off the finest homegrown goods from upstate and beyond.

Wylie Dufresne, whose molecular gastronomy earned him a Michelin star at the late wd-50, got into the pizza game during the pandemic, opening Stretch in 2022. Earlier this year, Carlo Mirarchi of Roberta’s in Bushwick inaugurated R Slice. Though these haute slice shops have carved out a niche in the city’s culinary landscape, it’s unlikely they’ll ever supplant their counterparts. For New Yorkers, pizza is highly personal—the benchmark for “the best” is as subjective as it is doctrinal. As Wiener states on his site, “There are over 2,000 pizzerias in NYC, and every single one of them is somebody's favorite.”

For many, pizza is about sentimentality and simplicity. Others prefer a flashy flourish. Still, others think waiting in a line that spills onto the sidewalk for a slice is ridiculous. Holding the two to the same standards is like comparing chalk and cheese and disregards one crucial factor: price point. “The newer places start at around $4.50 per slice. The older are closer to $3.50. That’s a big difference,” indicates Wiener. “Plus, they’re just not trying to do the same things. A simple slice, and then one finished with parmesan, basil, and olive oil after the bake? I don’t think they’re occupying the same base.”

Back to the aughts

Top Chef premiered in 2006, marking an inflection point for how Americans, especially New Yorkers, perceived restaurants, shifting their attention toward chef-driven establishments, a trajectory still pressing forward thanks to The Bear.

“Celebrity chef culture has a lot to do with it, “ remarks Wiener. “It not only humanized the people making the food, it really personalized them. Top Chef and cooking programs in general cast a hero status on the people cooking, and that’s definitely trickled into the pizza realm.”

The aughts also gave rise to Neapolitan-style game changers like Roberta’s, Keste, and Motorino, marking a pivotal pizza period steeped in storytelling, quality ingredients, and seasonality that Wiener believes paved the way for today’s new wavers. “We wouldn’t have today’s slice joints without them. The customer’s willingness to trade on convenience and pay more and their expectation of higher quality and ingredients boomeranged back to the slice, and that's why, in the past five years, customers have allowed pizza by the slice to take on higher quality characteristics.”

If every New York pizzaiolo only riffed on the classic, the scene would belie the city’s melting pot status. Only in New York could one find a Neapolitan pizzeria that the Italy-based 50 Top Pizza organization christened the world’s best: Anthony Mangieri’s Una Pizza Napoletana. The self-taught New Jerseyan seeks inspiration from Naples, where he’s been traveling to visit family since childhood. He forgoes the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana’s rigid guidelines in favor of his own style, a technique he’s been tinkering with since childhood. Una Pizza Napoletana’s current incarnation returned to New York in 2018, following a six-year stint in the aughts that Mangieri transferred to California in 2010. The menu’s six pies include a weekly rotating special, and, ingredient-wise, he goes for whatever “is the best version of itself,”  from DOP buffalo mozzarella and San Marzano tomatoes to domestic bounty like California walnuts and New Jersey onions.

And New York pizza culture could never live up to the city’s reputation without some outward emanation. Since 2012, the PATH train has been shuttling New Yorkers under the Hudson River to Dan Richer’s Razza, a Jersey City pizzeria rooted in Neapolitan tradition overlain with a local flair like farm-fresh New Jersey tomatoes and local buffalo mozzarella. In his 2017 review, former New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells called it New York’s best pizzeria. Razza remains popular among New Yorkers who already have plenty to pick from within the five boroughs, a testament to what thrills Wiener the most about today’s scene: “customers willing and able to expand their horizon”—a New York state of mind not limited to New York.