The Crust and the Argument: A Borough-by-Borough Guide to New York's Essential Pizzerias

New York has been arguing about pizza since there was pizza to argue about, which is to say since 1905, when Gennaro Lombardi opened the first pizzeria in the United States on Spring Street in SoHo and set the terms of a debate that has not been resolved in the 120 years since. The argument is not really about which pizzeria is best — though that argument is conducted at volume and in earnest by people who feel strongly about it. The argument is about what pizza is, what it is supposed to be, and what it means about a city and a culture and a tradition that a particular piece of dough with particular toppings baked in a particular oven can generate this level of sustained collective passion.

The styles available in New York are by now numerous enough to constitute a taxonomy. The New York Classic slice — thin, foldable, charred underneath, available from a gas or coal oven, eaten standing on the sidewalk — is the foundational form. The coal-fired whole-pie tradition, descended directly from Lombardi and carried forward by Totonno's and Patsy's and John's of Bleecker and Lucali, is the prestige form. The Neapolitan, imported directly from Naples and its Vera Pizza Napoletana standards with their specific flour and specific tomatoes and specific wood-fired ovens, is the artisanal form. The Sicilian — thick-crusted, square-cut, fried on its bottom in olive oil — is the boroughs form, perfected at L&B Spumoni Gardens in Gravesend and updated by Prince Street Pizza in SoHo. The Detroit style, barely two decades old in New York, is the new argument.

Each style has its advocates, its origin myths, and its canonical locations. What follows is a borough-by-borough guide to the pizzerias that matter — what they make, how they operate, what you should know before you go, and why, in a city with more excellent restaurants per square mile than anywhere on earth, a piece of dough with tomato and cheese can still be the most consequential thing you eat all day.

A Primer on Styles

Before the pizzerias, the styles — because knowing what you are ordering determines whether you are ordering correctly.

New York Classic

The New York slice is the one the rest of the world thinks of when it thinks of New York pizza: a large, thin triangle of dough topped with a cooked tomato sauce and low-moisture mozzarella, baked in a gas or coal deck oven at temperatures between 500 and 600 degrees until the cheese is blistered and the underside has developed a char. The slice is large enough to require folding lengthwise before eating — the fold both concentrates the flavour and prevents the tip from drooping under the weight of the toppings — and is sold individually from a display of whole pies maintained warm under heat lamps.

The crust at a good New York classic pizzeria has specific qualities: thin in the middle, with a slightly thicker and airy rim (the cornicione), a texture that is simultaneously crisp on the bottom and tender through the body, and a flavour from the fermented dough that is complex enough to be interesting eaten plain. The sauce is bright and lightly sweet from the tomatoes, applied in a thin layer that does not compete with the cheese. The cheese is pulled and stretched on top, not shredded, and blisters under the heat into golden pockets. A good New York slice has char on the bottom, dome on the cheese, and enough structural integrity to support the fold for the duration of the walk from the counter to wherever you are going to eat it.

Price range: $4–$8 per slice. Cash often preferred.

Coal-Fired

The coal-fired whole-pie tradition is New York pizza at its most formal and most demanding. Coal ovens reach temperatures of 900 to 1,000 degrees — significantly hotter than any gas oven — producing a cook time of three to four minutes and a specific set of results: a crust that blisters and chars in a different pattern from gas-oven pizza, a bottom that develops a particular crunch and slight smokiness from the coal combustion, and a whole-pie experience that does not translate to the slice format because the pie needs to be eaten immediately and in its entirety.

Coal-fired pizzerias are, almost without exception, whole-pie-only: no slices, because the economics of maintaining a coal oven at operating temperature require that pies be sold whole rather than by the piece. Most require table service; several are cash only. The experience is dinner rather than lunch, occasion rather than errand, and the pizza — at the establishments that do it best — justifies the distinction.

Price range: $25–$35 for a whole pie. Cash often required.

Neapolitan

The Neapolitan tradition originates in Naples, where pizza was invented in some form in the eighteenth century and codified by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN) in 1984 into a set of standards governing flour (Caputo 00), tomatoes (San Marzano DOP), mozzarella (fior di latte or buffalo mozzarella DOP), olive oil, basil, and the wood-fired oven (300–400°C, 60–90 second cook time) that produces the characteristic leopard-spotted crust with its soft, wet centre and charred bubbles.

New York Neapolitan is not always AVPN-certified — some of the best practitioners are more interested in the spirit of the tradition than its bureaucratic expression — but shares the general character: a smaller, softer, wetter pie than the New York classic, with a puffy cornicione, a centre that retains moisture from the fresh tomatoes or mozzarella, and a crust that has the char and lightness produced by extreme heat and short cook time. Neapolitan pizza is eaten with a knife and fork at table — the softness of the centre makes folding impractical — and is not sold by the slice at serious establishments.

Price range: $18–$30 per pie. Table service standard.

Sicilian

The Sicilian is the thick-crusted, rectangular pizza of the immigrant tradition — a slab of yeasted dough, risen high and fried on its bottom in a well-oiled pan, then topped and baked until the crust is golden-brown and crisp on the exterior and soft and airy within. The classic Sicilian is topped with a chunky tomato sauce and a strong aged cheese; the New York Sicilian tradition has produced variations including the "grandma" style (thinner than classic Sicilian, baked in a home-style pan) and the SoHo evolution represented by Prince Street Pizza's square with its cupped, charred pepperoni.

Price range: $5–$10 per slice. Often sold by the square piece.

Detroit

The Detroit style — developed in Detroit's Buddy's Diner in 1946, arrived in New York in meaningful form only in the past decade — is the Sicilian's first cousin: a thick, rectangular pizza baked in a rectangular steel pan (originally automotive parts trays from Detroit's auto industry), with the cheese layered to the edges of the pan so that it caramelises and crisps against the metal into a frico crust along the sides. The sauce is applied on top of the cheese after baking rather than beneath it, a reversal of standard practice that keeps the crust crispy. The result is a pizza with a deeply caramelised perimeter, a pillowy interior crumb, and a structural robustness that makes it the most satisfying of the thick-crust styles to eat by hand.

Price range: $6–$8 per slice.

Manhattan

Joe's Pizza

7 Carmine St, West Village · NY Classic · Slices $4.50–5.50 · Limited seating · Pizza only

Joe's is the standard. Not the most famous, not the most historic, not the subject of the most intense critical attention — but the place that, if you asked a thoughtful person who had eaten at every significant pizzeria in New York which one they would eat at every day for the rest of their life, they would most likely name. Pino "Joe" Pozzuoli opened the original Carmine Street location in 1975, and the pizza he established — the New York classic slice at its most platonic, with the correct ratio of crust to sauce to cheese, the correct char on the bottom, the correct structural integrity for the fold — has been reproduced with extraordinary consistency across nearly five decades and three locations.

The slice at Joe's is $4.50 to $5.50, depending on topping, and is worth every cent and more. Seating is limited to a few stools and the sidewalk; the expectation is that you fold the slice, eat it while standing, and return to the window for another if necessary. Open late — until 4 AM on weekends — which makes it the last and first pizza decision of the night and morning simultaneously.

John's of Bleecker Street

278 Bleecker St, West Village · Coal-Fired · Whole pie only · Full service · Cash only

John's has been on Bleecker Street since 1929, making it one of the oldest continuously operating pizzerias in New York, and it has spent that entire period doing exactly what it does: coal-fired whole pies, no slices, cash only, in a room where the wooden booths have been carved with the initials of decades of customers. The policy of whole pies only is not arbitrary but the correct response to the coal-fired process — the crust that emerges from a 900-degree coal oven needs to be eaten immediately and in its entirety to be understood.

The pepperoni pie is the canonical order: the coal-fired crust, the bright tomato sauce, the mozzarella blistered into golden pools, and the pepperoni crisped at its edges by the intense heat of the oven. The room itself — the original wood-fired pizza oven visible from the dining room, the initials carved into every available surface, the particular light of a room that has been used for the same purpose for ninety-five years — is as much of the experience as the pizza.

Lombardi's

32 Spring St, SoHo · Coal-Fired · Whole pie only · Full service

America's first pizzeria, opened by Gennaro Lombardi in 1905 on Spring Street, establishing the entire tradition from which every other entry on this list descends. The original location closed in 1984 and reopened in 1994 a few doors away; the current operation, while not continuous with the 1905 original in the strictest sense, occupies the same neighbourhood and maintains the same coal-fired whole-pie tradition that Lombardi brought from Naples.

The margherita — fresh mozzarella, San Marzano tomatoes, fresh basil — and the clam pie — fresh clams, olive oil, garlic, no tomato — are the canonical orders, both representing the direct lineage of Neapolitan tradition in its American form. The crowds are significant, the waits are real, and the pizza is what it has always been: the original, in both the historical and culinary sense.

Prince Street Pizza

27 Prince St, SoHo · Sicilian · Slices $6–7 · No seating (standing only) · Pizza only

Prince Street Pizza's spicy pepperoni square has, in the past decade, become the most obsessively discussed pizza slice in New York — a status earned by the specific quality of what it does. The square is Sicilian in form: thick, airy dough fried on its bottom in the pan, with a crisp undercarriage and a soft interior. What makes the Prince Street square distinct is the pepperoni: small rounds of quality pepperoni that curl and char at their edges under the broiler, forming the distinctive cupped shape that has become the visual signature of the style, concentrating their fat and flavour into pools within each cup. The result is simultaneously the crispest and the richest thing on the block.

No seating, no tables — you order at the window and eat on the street or on the steps of the building next door. Open until 5 AM on weekends, which covers every possible situation in SoHo that ends with needing a slice.

NY Pizza Suprema

413 8th Ave, Penn Station · NY Classic · Slices $4–5 · Limited seating

Located directly across from Madison Square Garden and Penn Station — two of the most relentlessly tourist-adjacent locations in Manhattan — NY Pizza Suprema has maintained the quality of a neighbourhood pizzeria in a context that rewards mediocrity. The slice is a proper New York classic: the dough correctly fermented, the sauce correctly seasoned, the cheese correctly blistered. In a stretch of 8th Avenue where inferior pizza is available in unlimited quantity, this matters enormously. The pre-game and post-commute crowd have been eating here since 1964; the pizza has not changed, which is the highest possible praise in this context.

Una Pizza Napoletana

175 Orchard St, LES · Neapolitan · One pie per person · Thu–Sat only · Full service · $$$

Anthony Mangieri's Una Pizza Napoletana is the most fanatical pizzeria in New York, which is saying something in a city not short of fanaticism. Mangieri has spent thirty years pursuing a specific vision of Neapolitan pizza — the wood-fired crust, the imported San Marzano tomatoes, the fior di latte mozzarella — with a purity of focus that has made him both legendary and polarising. The restaurant is open Thursday through Saturday only, serves one pie per person, and charges prices that are high even by Manhattan standards. The pizza is extraordinary: a crust of complex flavour from a slow fermentation, a char that is genuinely beautiful in its irregularity, and a topping simplicity that requires every element to be perfect because there is nowhere to hide.

The abbreviated schedule — three days a week — is not a marketing decision but a reflection of what the dough requires. Mangieri makes everything himself, to his own timeline, and the timeline is what it is. Book ahead if the restaurant takes reservations; arrive early if it does not.

Song'e Napule

132 W Houston St, SoHo · Neapolitan · Full service · Full Italian menu

Song'e Napule is the more accessible of the two serious Neapolitan operations in Lower Manhattan — open daily, full menu of Italian antipasti and pasta alongside the pizza, wine programme, a proper dining experience rather than a single-minded pursuit. The pizza is excellent: a proper Neapolitan crust with the correct char and the correct softness at the centre, topped with quality Italian imports. The eggplant parmigiana and the fried starters are worth ordering alongside. For a full Italian dinner that includes great Neapolitan pizza without the ritual demands of Una Pizza Napoletana, this is the correct choice.

Don Antonio

309 W 50th St, Hell's Kitchen · Neapolitan · Full service · Pizza and apps

Roberto Caporuscio's Don Antonio has been one of the most respected Neapolitan operations in Midtown since its opening, drawing on Caporuscio's training in Naples and his long relationship with the AVPN. The Montanara Starita — a fried pizza dough topped with smoked buffalo mozzarella and San Marzano tomatoes — is the signature, a preparation that predates the wood-fired oven as the dominant pizza technology and produces a crust with a specific lightness and richness simultaneously. The wood-fired pies are equally accomplished. A serious Neapolitan destination in a part of Midtown where serious pizza is otherwise scarce.

Capizzi

547 9th Ave, Hell's Kitchen · Neapolitan · Full service with bar · Pizza and apps

A neighbourhood Neapolitan that has been serving the Hell's Kitchen community since 2011 with a warmth and consistency that the more celebrated destinations sometimes sacrifice to their own mythology. The pizza is genuine: a wood-fired crust with the correct structure, topped with quality ingredients, served in a room that has a bar and a full menu and the feeling of a place that is primarily interested in feeding its neighbourhood rather than performing for its press coverage. The calzone is excellent. The wine list is thoughtful. The kind of restaurant that regulars treat as an extension of their living room.

Scarr's Pizza

35 Orchard St, LES · NY Classic · Slices $4.50–6 · Full service with bar · Pizza and apps

Scarr Pimentel's Orchard Street operation is the most thoughtfully sourced New York classic slice in the city — the flour is stone-milled, the tomatoes are quality imported Italian, the cheese is made with care — in a setting that combines a proper slice counter with a full bar and a back room that hosts the lower east side's late-night crowd. The result is a pizzeria that takes the New York slice as seriously as the Neapolitan places take their pies, arguing through practice that the classic form is worthy of the same attention. The white slice — ricotta, mozzarella, olive oil, garlic — is the canonical order for those who have already established their relationship with the red. Open late; the bar crowd and the slice crowd overlap productively.

L'industrie Pizzeria (Manhattan)

197 Grand St, Little Italy · NY Classic · Slices $5–7 · Limited seating · Pizza and apps

The Manhattan outpost of the Williamsburg original (see Brooklyn below), bringing Massimo Laveglia's exceptional slice operation to Little Italy. The burrata slice — fresh burrata applied to a properly charred New York base — has become the signature, and it earns the attention: the contrast between the char of the crust and the cool, creamy burrata is a genuinely pleasurable combination that improves on both elements individually. The spicy vodka slice is the second canonical order. Limited seating means this is primarily a standing-and-walking operation, which suits the neighborhood and the pizza both.

Artichoke Basille's

114 10th Ave, Chelsea · Sicilian · Slices $7–10 · Full service with bar · Pizza only

Artichoke Basille's artichoke slice — a thick Sicilian square topped with a creamy sauce of artichoke hearts, spinach, cream cheese, and mozzarella — is one of the most specific and most imitated pizza creations in recent New York history. It is also, at 2 AM after a long night in Chelsea, one of the most satisfying things available in the city. The square has a deep, caramelised bottom and a topping dense enough to require a fork for the first few bites. The crab slice, available at some locations, is the second canonical order. Expensive by the slice standard; worth it by the experience standard.

Nolita Pizza

68 Kenmare St, NoLIta · NY Classic · Slices $5–7 · Limited seating · Pizza only

A quiet, correct New York classic operation in the NoLIta/Little Italy border zone — the kind of place that does not seek attention, does not need to, and makes a very good slice for the people who live nearby and the people who find it. The cheese slice is the base case; the variations are executed with the same attention. In a neighbourhood increasingly defined by destination dining, Nolita Pizza represents the value of a place that simply makes good pizza for whoever walks in.

Uncle Sam's Pizza

17 Clinton St, LES · NY Classic · Slices $5–6 · Five stools · Pizza only

Five stools. The most minimal seating arrangement that qualifies as seating. Uncle Sam's on Clinton Street is the Lower East Side's neighbourhood slice shop in its purest form — a tiny counter operation serving a very good New York classic slice to the immediate community, open late, priced honestly, without any of the apparatus of ambition or attention. The kind of place that exists because the neighbourhood needs it to, and that the neighbourhood would lose with genuine grief if it closed.

Vito's Slices and Ices

464 9th Ave, Hell's Kitchen · NY Classic · Slices $4–5 · Limited seating · Pizza only

The name says everything: slices and ices, pizza and Italian ice, the two most basic satisfactions of the New York street food tradition in a single small operation on 9th Avenue. Vito's serves the full-value New York classic slice at $4 to $5 and the Italian ice in a range of flavours, and it does both without pretension or embellishment. Hell's Kitchen has been gentrifying for twenty years; Vito's represents the price point and the ethos of what the neighbourhood used to be.

Quality Pizza Co.

888 6th Ave, Midtown · NY Classic · Slices $4–5 · Limited seating · Pizza only

The name is both a description and a quiet argument: quality is not a surprise here but the stated premise. Midtown is pizza's hardest territory — the combination of captive tourist traffic, high rents, and rushed lunch customers creates every incentive to reduce quality and increase volume — and Quality Pizza Co. declines to make those compromises. The slice at $4 to $5 is the honest price for a correctly made New York classic, available to commuters and office workers and tourists in equal measure without distinction.

Corner Slice

600 11th Ave, Hell's Kitchen · Sicilian · Slices $5–7 · Limited seating · Pizza only

At the far western edge of Hell's Kitchen, where 11th Avenue meets the Hudson Yards development and the industry that predated it, Corner Slice makes a proper Sicilian square — thick, well-oiled, crisp on the bottom, airy through the body — at a price point and in a location that serve the neighbourhood's construction workers, taxi drivers, and the residents who have been there long enough to remember when this stretch of 11th Avenue was less fashionable than it currently pretends to be.

Patsy's Pizzeria

2287 1st Ave, East Harlem · Coal-Fired · Whole pie only · Cash only · Full service

The original Patsy's — not the franchise chain that now operates under the same name across the city, but the East Harlem institution opened by Pasquale "Patsy" Lancieri in 1933 — is one of the most historically significant pizzerias in New York, and its survival on First Avenue in a neighbourhood that has not been the centre of culinary attention for several decades is a minor miracle of institutional stubbornness. The coal-fired oven is original; the family connection to the founding is maintained; the pizza is the classic coal-fired New York pie at its most austere and most honest.

Cash only — a policy that communicates, among other things, that the establishment has not needed to reconsider its operating model in several generations. Worth the trip to East Harlem for the history and the pizza both, in that order or simultaneously.

Olio e Più

3 Greenwich Ave, West Village · Neapolitan · Full service with bar · Full Italian menu

Olio e Più occupies the ground floor of a corner building at the junction of Greenwich and 6th Avenues — one of the more characterful intersections in the Village — with a wood-fired oven visible from the dining room and a full Italian menu that extends well beyond pizza into antipasti, salumi, and pastas. The Neapolitan pies are accomplished: the crust correctly charred, the ingredients correctly sourced, the whole experience correctly calibrated for a West Village dinner rather than a quick lunch. The wood-fired burrata starter is the canonical first course; the margherita or the diavola (spicy salami and chili) are the canonical pies.

Brooklyn

Lucali

575 Henry St, Carroll Gardens · Coal-Fired · BYOB · Cash only · Full service

Lucali is the most sought-after pizza reservation in New York, which understates the difficulty: the restaurant does not take reservations, operates a walk-in list that fills before the dinner service begins, and has a wait time on busy evenings that runs to two hours or more. Mark Iacono has been making pies in Carroll Gardens since 2006 — coal-fired, thin-crusted, of a simplicity and quality that makes the waiting, every time, entirely reasonable.

The pizza at Lucali is made by Iacono himself, each pie stretched and dressed by hand, the toppings limited to the essentials: tomato, fresh mozzarella, basil, and a few additions available on request. The calzone — folded, sealed, baked until the exterior is blistered and the interior is molten — is the alternative canonical order. BYOB: bring a bottle of wine to drink with the pie, which improves both. Cash only. Arrive before the list opens, put your name down, walk to a nearby bar for an hour, return when summoned. The system is imperfect and the pizza is not.

Di Fara Pizza

1424 Avenue J, Midwood · NY Classic · Slices $7–8 · Cash only · Limited seating

Domenico DeMarco made every pizza at Di Fara himself for nearly fifty years — stretching the dough, ladling the sauce, layering the cheese, cutting fresh basil from the plant on the counter with scissors over each completed pie, finishing with a drizzle of olive oil from a can he kept on the shelf — and the pizza he made in that ritual, repeated every day until his health finally required him to pass the work to family members, is among the most important in the history of New York pizza.

The slice is now $7 to $8, the highest in the city by a significant margin for a New York classic, and it is worth the price and the pilgrimage to Midwood — well past the end of the F or Q subway line, a neighbourhood that is not on the way to anywhere else — and the wait, which can be considerable. The olive oil finish, the fresh basil, the specific char of a pie made by someone who has been doing it the same way for fifty years: these are not reproducible at any other address in New York.

Grimaldi's

1 Front St, DUMBO · Coal-Fired · Whole pie only · Full service

Grimaldi's occupies the most atmospheric pizza real estate in New York: a position directly beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, in the DUMBO neighbourhood where the stone arch of the Manhattan anchorage towers above and the East River is a short walk in either direction. The coal-fired whole pies — margherita with fresh mozzarella and basil; the various specials — are made in an oven that has been producing this specific result since the establishment opened, and the combination of the pizza and the location is, on a good evening, one of the more satisfying experiences available in Brooklyn.

The original Grimaldi's occupied a space even closer to the bridge before a rent dispute relocated it; the current address is slightly less perfectly positioned but the pizza and the setting remain exceptional. Lines on weekends; worth it.

Juliana's

19 Old Fulton St, DUMBO · Coal-Fired · Two seatings per day · Full service

The dispute between Grimaldi's and Juliana's is one of the more operatically complicated situations in New York pizza history. Patsy Grimaldi, who had sold the original Grimaldi's and was contractually prohibited from opening under that name, opened Juliana's in the original Grimaldi's space — the one vacated when the current Grimaldi's relocated to 1 Front Street — making the two establishments not just neighbours but each other's origin stories.

Juliana's operates two seatings per day and requires patience in proportion to the quality, which is high: the coal-fired crust has the specific character that the original Grimaldi's name was built on, and the margherita — applied with the restraint that coal-fired pizza requires — is the correct order. The DUMBO location, shared with its former self, is part of the experience.

L'industrie Pizzeria (Original)

254 S 2nd St, Williamsburg · NY Classic · Slices $5–7 · Limited seating · Pizza and apps

Massimo Laveglia's original Williamsburg location is the source of the burrata slice that has made L'industrie one of the most discussed pizzerias in New York over the past five years. The slice itself is a properly made New York classic base — correctly fermented dough, correctly charred — elevated by the addition of fresh burrata at service, the warmth of the pizza beginning to melt the cheese's exterior while the interior remains cool. A combination that sounds like a trend and tastes like a permanent improvement to the form.

The spicy vodka slice — a red vodka sauce applied to the New York classic base — is the second canonical order. Limited seating in the Williamsburg original means this is primarily a counter operation; the queue on weekends is significant and self-sustaining.

Roberta's

261 Moore St, Bushwick · Neapolitan · Full service with bar · Full Italian menu

Roberta's opened in Bushwick in 2008 in a converted warehouse with a corrugated metal exterior, a wood-fired oven visible from the dining room, and a radio antenna on the roof, and it proceeded to become one of the most influential restaurants — not just pizzerias — in New York in the past two decades. The Bee Sting — tomato, mozzarella, sopressata, chili, and honey, the sweet-heat combination that became Roberta's signature — is the canonical pie, though the rotating seasonal menu and the willingness to try unusual combinations has kept the kitchen genuinely interesting across sixteen years of operation.

Roberta's is a full Italian restaurant as much as it is a pizzeria: the antipasti, the pasta specials, and the wood-fired vegetable preparations are all worth ordering. The outdoor garden, which runs through the warm months, is the best al fresco dining situation in Bushwick. The waits are long; the pizza is worth them; the full meal is worth more.

Totonno's

1524 Neptune Ave, Coney Island · Coal-Fired · Saturday and Sunday only · Cash only · Limited seating

Anthony "Totonno" Pero arrived from Naples in 1903, worked at Lombardi's on Spring Street — learning the American coal-fired pizza tradition at its source — and opened his own pizzeria on Neptune Avenue in Coney Island in 1924. The result is one of the oldest continuously operating pizzerias in the United States, producing a coal-fired pie of Neapolitan directness and simplicity that connects the current operation to the original tradition more directly than almost any other pizzeria in New York.

Open Saturday and Sunday only — hours that are simultaneously a constraint and an argument about how pizza should be made, which is slowly and on the maker's terms. Cash only. The pie is thin, coal-fired, and topped with fresh mozzarella and a sauce of San Marzano tomatoes that has not been adjusted for a hundred years. The trip to Coney Island is part of the experience, and the combination of the boardwalk and the pizza is, on a summer weekend, one of the genuinely irreplaceable New York afternoons.

Best Pizza

33 Havemeyer St, Williamsburg · NY Classic · Slices $4–6 · Limited seating · Pizza only

The name is an argument, and it is made with a specific confidence. Best Pizza is a Williamsburg neighbourhood slice shop that has earned its local reputation through consistent, quality New York classic pizza at honest prices — the cheese slice correctly made, the sauce correctly seasoned, the crust correctly charred. In a neighbourhood that has more destination restaurants per block than anywhere else in Brooklyn, Best Pizza serves the people who live there rather than the people who are visiting to eat at the destination restaurants. The white garlic pie, available in slices, is the secondary canonical order.

Emily

919 Fulton St, Clinton Hill · Detroit · Full service with bar · Full Italian menu

Clinton Hill Emily was, when it opened in 2014, one of the first serious Detroit-style pizza operations in New York, and it remains among the best. The pies are built in the rectangular steel pans with cheese to the edges — the caramelised perimeter crust (the frico) is the defining textural element — with sauce applied over the top after baking and a range of toppings that extend the Detroit concept without losing its essential character. The Colony — honey, pickled jalapeño, and pepperoni — is the canonical order, the sweet-heat combination that made Emily's reputation.

The wine list and full Italian menu make this a dinner destination as much as a pizza destination; the wood-roasted vegetables and the pasta specials are worth ordering alongside the pie. Book ahead for weekends.

Ace's Pizza

637 Driggs Ave, Williamsburg · Detroit · Slices available · Full service with bar · Pizza and apps

One of the very few Detroit-style operations in New York that sells by the slice, Ace's democratises a style that is otherwise confined to the whole-pie table-service format. The rectangular slices — available warm from the display with the characteristic caramelised cheese perimeter and the sauce-on-top Detroit configuration — make the style accessible as a quick lunch or a post-bar snack in addition to a sit-down dinner. The bar component and the full seating make it a destination in its own right.

Sottocasa

298 Atlantic Ave, Boerum Hill · Neapolitan · Full service with bar · Pizza and apps

A Neapolitan operation that has been serving the Boerum Hill and Atlantic Avenue neighbourhood since 2013 with a consistent quality that has made it a genuine local institution — the kind of pizzeria that a neighbourhood settles around, where the regulars have a table and the newcomers become regulars because the pizza is good and the room is comfortable and the prices are reasonable. The Napoletana — anchovies, olives, capers — is the canonical order for those who trust the kitchen's Italian reflexes. The margherita is correct for everyone else.

Macoletta (Williamsburg)

58 N 9th St, Williamsburg · Neapolitan · Full service with bar · Full Italian menu

Macoletta brings a full Neapolitan pizzeria experience — wood-fired oven, proper dough, proper sourcing — to the heart of Williamsburg's restaurant corridor, with a full Italian menu of starters and pasta alongside the pies. The fritta (fried pizza dough, a Neapolitan street food tradition) is the canonical starter; the margherita and the cicchetti (ricotta, anchovy, capers) are the canonical pies. A serious operation that earns its place in a neighbourhood full of serious operations.

Aromi

552 Court St, Carroll Gardens · Neapolitan · Full service with bar · Full Italian menu

The Carroll Gardens location situates Aromi in the neighbourhood that is also home to Lucali — a proximity that would intimidate a lesser operation. Aromi holds its own by being a genuinely different proposition: where Lucali is monastic in its focus and minimal in its menu, Aromi is a full Italian restaurant with Neapolitan pizza at its centre, a warm room, a wine list, and a kitchen that produces antipasti and pasta with the same seriousness it brings to the pies. The neighbourhood can sustain both.

L&B Spumoni Gardens

2725 86th St, Gravesend · Sicilian · Slices $5–6 · Full service with bar · Full Italian menu

L&B Spumoni Gardens is, in terms of cultural authority and institutional longevity, the most significant Sicilian pizzeria in New York and possibly in the United States. Ludovico Barbati opened the original spumoni garden in 1939; the Sicilian pizza operation grew from it; the full restaurant followed; and the Gravesend institution has been a Sunday destination for Brooklyn families for eight decades.

The Sicilian square at L&B is made in the traditional style but upside-down by conventional pizza logic: the sauce is applied directly to the pan first, then the dough is pressed over it and allowed to rise, then the cheese is applied, then the whole construction is baked. The result is a pie with the sauce inside the dough rather than on top of it — a protection against the sauce drying out during the long bake — with the cheese on top developing a specific golden crust and the dough beneath it rising around the contained sauce into a structure that is simultaneously crispier and more tender than any other Sicilian style in the city.

The spumoni — the tri-color Italian ice cream that gives the establishment its name — is the canonical dessert. The full Italian menu served in the indoor restaurant is the canonical Sunday lunch. The outdoor picnic tables in summer are the canonical New York experience.

Paulie Gee's Slice Shop

110 Franklin St, Greenpoint · NY Classic · Slices $5.25–7 · Limited seating · Pizza only

Paul Giannone — Paulie Gee — opened his original full-service Neapolitan pizzeria on Greenpoint Avenue in 2010 and followed it with the Slice Shop on Franklin Street, a slice-focused operation that brings the same sourcing and quality to the by-the-slice format. The Slice Shop's pies are New York classic in form — foldable, large, correctly charred — but made with the ingredient quality of a full-service restaurant: properly fermented dough, quality tomatoes, mozzarella that is pulled rather than shredded. The Hellboy — fennel sausage, fresh mozzarella, cherry tomatoes, hot honey — is the signature slice, a combination that has accumulated a following of its own.

Queens

Macoletta (Long Island City)

28-15 24th Ave, Astoria · Neapolitan · Full service with bar · Full Italian menu

The Astoria outpost of the Macoletta operation brings proper Neapolitan pizza to a Queens neighbourhood that has long had the density of Italian-American food culture to support it. The wood-fired oven, the proper dough, and the full Italian menu translate directly from the Williamsburg location into a neighbourhood context that is, if anything, more naturally suited to the serious Neapolitan tradition. Astoria's Greek and Italian communities have coexisted in the same dining culture for decades; Macoletta arrives in that context as a serious addition.

New Park Pizza

156-71 Cross Bay Blvd, Howard Beach · NY Classic · Slices $3.50–5 · Limited seating · Pizza only

New Park Pizza in Howard Beach is the outer-borough New York classic slice at its most authentic and most undervisited — a family-run operation making a genuinely excellent pizza at $3.50 to $5 per slice, for the residents of a Queens neighbourhood that is not on the culinary tourism circuit and has no particular interest in becoming so. The slice is correctly made: the crust has the fermented depth, the char has the correct bitterness, the sauce has the right brightness, and the cheese has the right pull. Worth the trip on the A train to Howard Beach, which is long and which deposits you in a neighbourhood where New York pizza exists at its most uncomplicatedly local.

The Bronx

Zero Otto Nove

2357 Arthur Ave, Belmont · Neapolitan · Full service with bar · Full Italian menu

Arthur Avenue in the Belmont neighbourhood of the Bronx is the most authentic Italian-American commercial street remaining in New York — more genuinely Italian than the tourist-facing stretch of Mulberry Street in Manhattan's Little Italy, with a working retail market, Italian butchers and cheese shops and pasta makers operating as they have for decades. Zero Otto Nove (named for the Salerno area code in Italy, where owner Roberto Paciullo is from) is the restaurant that the street deserves: a full-service Italian restaurant with a wood-fired Neapolitan pizza operation, a full menu of southern Italian cooking, and a level of quality that reflects both the seriousness of the owner's sourcing and the standards of the neighbourhood.

The pizza is among the best Neapolitan work in New York, and it is served in the context of a full Italian meal — antipasti, pasta, secondi — that makes the trip to Arthur Avenue something more than a pizza errand. Come on a Saturday, when the market is operating and the neighbourhood is at its most fully itself, and eat lunch at Zero Otto Nove after walking the market. The calzone fritto — fried and filled — is the canonical first order; the margherita is the canonical pizza.

The Arguments Worth Having

The Great Style Debate

New Yorkers argue about pizza styles with an intensity that people from other cities find disproportionate, and the disproportionateness is the point. Pizza style is, in New York, a proxy for a larger argument about authenticity, tradition, and the right relationship between a food and its culture.

The New York classic slice is the indigenous form — the pizza that New York developed from the Neapolitan tradition and made its own, adapting it to the gas-oven technology available to the immigrant operators who built the city's pizzerias, to the eating habits of a working population that needed food quickly and cheaply, and to the specific character of New York water (soft, mineral-light, consistently cited by pizza makers as an ingredient in the dough that cannot be replicated elsewhere). It is the form that belongs to New York as the Margherita belongs to Naples, and defending it against the assertion that the "real" pizza is always Neapolitan is the correct position.

The Neapolitan, for its part, is the origin of everything — the form from which the New York slice descended, and which serious practitioners like Mangieri and Caporuscio maintain with a purity of intent that the derivative traditions cannot claim. To argue that the New York slice is better than the Neapolitan is to argue that the adaptation has exceeded the original, which is sometimes true and is certainly an interesting argument.

The Sicilian and the Detroit are the people's choices — the thick-crust, high-carbohydrate, filling-and-honest forms that do not claim refinement but deliver satisfaction in a way the thinner styles sometimes cannot. L&B's inverted Sicilian is not trying to be Lucali's coal-fired whole pie; it is trying to be the best Sicilian square available, and it succeeds completely on its own terms.

The Coal vs. Gas Question

Coal-fired ovens reach 900 to 1,000 degrees; gas ovens typically reach 500 to 600 degrees. The difference in temperature produces a difference in cook time (three to four minutes in coal versus six to eight in gas) and a difference in crust character (the coal oven produces a specific char and a slight smokiness that gas cannot replicate). Coal ovens are also increasingly difficult to operate in New York City, where air quality regulations have restricted the installation of new coal-fired equipment, making the existing coal ovens at Lombardi's, John's, Lucali, Totonno's, and the others genuinely irreplaceable — there will be no new coal-fired pizzerias in New York in any legally straightforward sense.

This gives the coal-fired tradition an urgency it might not otherwise have: eat at these places, because the ovens that make the pizza will not be replaced when they fail.

Cash Only and the No-Slice Policy

Several of the most significant pizzerias on this list are cash only and/or whole-pie only, and both policies communicate something about the establishments that maintain them. Cash only is frequently a statement of simplicity and tradition — the avoidance of the transaction costs and the operational complexity of credit card processing — and at places like Lucali and Totonno's it functions as a reminder that the operation has been running since before the digital payment era and has not needed to reconsider. No slices is a statement about quality: the coal-fired pie is not suited to the slice format because it needs to be eaten immediately and as a whole, and the policy enforces the condition under which the pizza is best.

Both policies require slightly more preparation from the visitor and reward that preparation with pizza that is genuinely at its peak.

Practical Guide

For the first-time visitor who wants the definitive New York slice: Joe's Pizza, 7 Carmine Street. Arrive, order the plain cheese, fold it, eat it on the street. This is what New York pizza is. Everything else is a variation.

For the coal-fired whole-pie experience: John's of Bleecker Street (open daily, table service, the complete experience) or Lucali (requires patience and planning, but the highest expression of the form).

For the Sicilian: Prince Street Pizza for the modern cupped-pepperoni version; L&B Spumoni Gardens for the definitive traditional form and the full Brooklyn Sunday experience.

For the Neapolitan: Una Pizza Napoletana if you are prepared to plan around the schedule and the price; Don Antonio or Capizzi for excellent Neapolitan in a more accessible format.

For the Detroit: Emily in Clinton Hill, which remains the best expression of the style in New York.

For the outer boroughs: Di Fara for the pilgrimage pizza experience in Midwood; Totonno's for Coney Island and a century of coal-fired tradition; Zero Otto Nove for Arthur Avenue and the full Italian market experience; New Park Pizza for the honest outer-borough slice at its most purely local.

A note on timing: The best time to eat pizza at most of these establishments is before the dinner rush (5–6 PM) or at the lunch counter mid-afternoon (2–4 PM). Weekend evenings at Lucali, Roberta's, and Grimaldi's involve waits that require prior emotional preparation. The late-night slice at Joe's or Prince Street at 1 AM is one of the most specifically New York experiences available.

A note on the fold: Fold the New York classic slice lengthwise before eating. This is not optional. The fold concentrates the flavour, prevents the tip from drooping, and is the physical form in which the New York slice was designed to be consumed. Anyone who tells you otherwise is from somewhere else.

New York pizza is the sum of a century of argument, adaptation, immigration, competition, and the specific obsessiveness that the city brings to every question it considers worth asking. The argument is ongoing, the canonical establishments are still operating, and the correct response to the question of which is best is to spend several days finding out for yourself. Bring cash. Start with Joe's. End wherever the city takes you.