Few outside New Haven know that our small city helped innovate and popularize foods Americans eat all the time: burgers, bagels, lollipops. But it’s increasingly difficult not to know about our pizza.
Called “the pizza capital of the United States” by the popular reviewer Dave Portnoy and the country’s best pizza “community” by celebrity chef David Chang, New Haven boasts some of America’s oldest and, by increasingly popular opinion, finest pizza. Publications with national readerships—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker—have recently published stories about it. The world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, tried to extol it while eating non-New Haven pizza, though he couldn’t quite recall its distinguishing features: a thin, charred, crispy and chewy crust; sauce made with crushed plum tomatoes; grated pecorino Romano; and, of course, nomenclature. New Haven-style pizza is called apizza, pronounced “ah-beetz,” and it’s the original way to say “pizza” in the Neapolitan language, arriving here with Southern Italian immigrants over 125 years ago.
Now it’s the apizza that’s traveling, all around the country. Zuppardi’s Apizza in West Haven, which started in New Haven in 1932 as Salerno’s Bakery, ships individual frozen pizza orders to every state, averaging more than 250 orders and 1500 pizzas per week according to co-owner Lori Zuppardi. (Zuppardi’s also ships hundreds of pizzas weekly to supermarkets in states as far away as Texas.) Sally’s Apizza, whose iconic Wooster Street flagship opened in 1938, also sends frozen pizzas across the country, in similar numbers.
But it’s not just the pizza itself that’s being exported. It’s also the style. Apizza places now span the country from coast to coast and top to bottom. (And beyond, in distant lands including the UK, Belize, Hong Kong and Australia.) One of the earliest outposts of New Haven-style pizza was the New Haven Pizza Company in Manhattan, opened in 1990, followed by Basil Doc’s Pizza in Denver in 1996, with a dough recipe influenced by New Haven’s oldest spot, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, opened in 1925.
Doc’s is coy about its New Haven connection, but Tomatoes Apizza, launched in 1998 outside Detroit, puts it right in the name—and on the website, where its three locations are dubbed “Embass[ies] of New Haven.” “My father grew up in New Haven, and when I’d visit my grandmother, we’d go to Pepe’s,” founder Mike Weinstein recalls. He even studied with Lou Abate of Abate’s Apizza—recently relocated to North Haven after a fire at their longtime Wooster Street address—to get his own version as authentic as possible. As to how he converts locals into lovers of thin-crust gourmet pizza in a place noted for thick-crust pies and chain pizza joints, “I tell them you’ve been eating an imitation of pizza.”
Another Midwestern apizza flag was soon planted, this time courtesy of Chicago’s Piece Brewery and Pizzeria, founded in 2001 by Billy Jacobs. Also a native New Havener, Jacobs—who initially went to the Windy City in 1983 to start Jacobs Bros. Bagels (now called Brobagel)—grew up on Sally’s but couldn’t find anything as satisfying in the land of deep-dish. “Nothing came close to the New Haven apizza that we loved,” he says. “So, like bringing bagels to a city that was bagel-bereft, I was confident that New Haven apizza would be a hit here.” More than two decades later, the pizzeria appears to be thriving, and, like Zuppardi’s and Sally’s, Piece now ships its New Haven-style pizzas around the country, just not from New Haven.
In 2006, apizza headed southwest in two directions: to San Diego, California, via Basic Urban Kitchen + Bar (now wisely edited down to BASIC), and Austin, Texas, with Salvation Pizza. The next year, Double Mountain Brewery opened in Hood River, Oregon, as did Pete’s New Haven Style Apizza in Washington, DC. Nick’s New Haven Style Pizzeria launched in Boca Raton, Florida, in 2011, followed by Apizza di Napoli in Aiken, South Carolina, in 2012. Almost all of these apizza pioneers are still in business, and some have expanded to multiple locations.
Fantini’s Italian Restaurant in Stuart, Florida, is a relative newcomer, opened by native New Havener Jimmy Fantin in late 2019 after a long career in Florida real estate. For Fantin, the restaurant “fulfills a dream” he’s had “since I was 15 years old. My first job was at Frank Pepe’s, where I learned to make apizza from the best of the best. Fantini’s is my tribute to the old-school masters of Wooster Street.” For South Floridians, the biggest adjustment to the style appears to involve New Haven’s famous flavor-enhancing char, which sometimes leads them to assume—very incorrectly—that the pizza is “burnt,” Fantin says.
Chris Wallace, who launched Ozzy’s Apizza in Los Angeles as a popup in 2021, discovered a readier audience in L.A.’s local Armenian population. Apizza, it turns out, “has some similarities to a traditional Armenian flat bread called lahmajun and has helped us connect to our local customers through their own nostalgic tastes,” says Wallace, another native New Havener who found himself in a city he felt needed better pizza. “I was flabbergasted by how bad pizza was on the West Coast when I moved to California,” he says. Ozzy’s now operates on a more permanent basis in the courtyard of the Glen Arden social club, with Wallace quitting his other work to focus on apizza full-time. He’s now opened a second location right here in New Haven, one of more than 20 pizza vendors set to appear at tomorrow’s 9th Annual Apizza Feast (organized by one of this article’s co-authors, Colin Caplan).
Meanwhile, New Haven-style pizzerias keep popping up across the country, in Brooklyn, Boston, Burlington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, Cincinnati, Columbus, Tulsa, Memphis, Atlanta, Charlotte, Charleston, Jacksonville, Houston, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Boise, Sacramento, Portland and beyond, among them outposts of Pepe’s and Sally’s. The growing list, which has been compiled (also by Colin Caplan) into a global map-in-progress, currently finds New Haven-style pizzerias in 34 other states and eight foreign countries, totaling more than 140 locations outside of Connecticut. And as new places continue to open and offer their own version of apizza, you can use that map to follow the trail of deliciously charred crumbs.
Written by Colin Caplan and Dan Mims. Image, sourced from @sallysapizza, features an homage to an iconic Sally’s pie. Caplan is the founder and owner of Taste of New Haven, a provider of local culinary tours; author of the history book Pizza in New Haven (2018); and a producer of the New Haven pizza documentary Pizza: A Love Story (2019). Copies of both the book and the film are available for purchase here.
