Best Pizza Styles

Lombardi's on Spring Street is the usual starting point, licensed in 1905, though researchers have since traced the storefront to earlier owners. Low moisture cow's milk mozzarella on a wide hand tossed round gives the style its slice, firm enough to fold and eat standing up.

Frank Pepe opened on Wooster Street in 1925 and built the style around a coal fired oven that chars the thin crust into blistered black patches. The white clam pie, shucked littlenecks with garlic, oregano and grated cheese and no tomato at all, arrived in the 1960s.

The EU registered Pizza Napoletana as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed in 2010, setting soft wheat flour, a 60 to 90 second bake, and an oven floor above 430C. UNESCO added the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo to its intangible heritage list in 2017.

Sfincione traces to Palermo, where a thick spongy dough is dressed with onion, anchovy, tomato and breadcrumb instead of mozzarella. American Sicilian slices descend from it but simplified toward cheese and sauce, keeping the airy rectangle and the oil fried bottom crust.

Pizzeria Uno opened at 29 East Ohio Street in 1943, and its deep round pan pie has been credited to Ike Sewell, Ric Riccardo and the kitchen staff who worked for them. The inverted build, cheese laid under a chunky tomato layer, keeps the dairy intact through a bake that runs half an hour or more.

Gus Guerra started baking square pies at Buddy's Rendezvous in 1946 using steel utility pans borrowed from local auto plants, a shape the style never abandoned. Wisconsin brick cheese pushed to the pan walls fries into a lacquered edge, with sauce striped on top rather than underneath.

Papa's Tomato Pies has run in the Trenton area since 1912, one of the oldest continuously operating pizzerias in the country and the anchor of the style. Cheese hits the thin crust first with crushed tomato spooned over the top, a reversal that keeps the sauce tasting raw rather than baked flat.

Umberto's of New Hyde Park is generally credited with putting the home style pan pie on a Long Island menu in the 1970s, borrowing from what Italian households baked at home. Cheese goes down first and sauce is ladled over thin oiled sheet pan dough, which is what separates it from a proper Sicilian.

Roman bakeries were selling rectangular pizza by weight by the mid twentieth century, cut with scissors at the counter rather than sold as whole pies. Gabriele Bonci's Pizzarium, opened near the Vatican in 2003, pushed the format toward stone milled flours and long fermentation.

Alice Waters put a wood fired oven in the Chez Panisse cafe in Berkeley in 1980, and Ed LaDou was building untraditional pies in a Los Angeles kitchen around the same time. Wolfgang Puck hired LaDou for Spago in 1982, where duck sausage and smoked salmon pies turned thin crust into a chef's canvas.

The thin crackery round Chicago taverns began serving after Prohibition ended, rolled flat and cut into small squares so it could be eaten standing with a beer. Ask anyone from the neighborhoods and this, not Chicago Deep Dish, is the pie the city actually eats. The middle squares have no crust edge at all and go soft under heavy sausage, the tax on a pie this thin.

Buenos Aires drops the tomato entirely: cheese sealed inside a double crust and buried under sweet onions, a build credited to the Banchero family in La Boca. Its onion logic is closer to the sfincione behind Sicilian than to anything from Naples, and the sheer cheese load makes a second slice a commitment.

The pan pie of New England's Greek-immigrant shops, proofed in a shallow oiled pan so the bottom fries while the top bakes, usually traced to Pizza House in New London, Connecticut, and spread by storefronts trading as House of Pizza. White cheddar cut into the mozzarella sharpens it, but the pan oil that crisps the underside also leaves every slice greasy.

Harris Pizza in Rock Island anchors the style, with malt kneaded into the dough, a sauce that carries real chili heat, fennel-heavy sausage spread beneath the cheese rather than on top, and the whole pie cut into long strips with scissors, a build that trades neutral crispness for something closer to spiced dark bread.