America’s favorite one-dish meal used to be foreign food. Before the 1950s, pizza was a rarity in this country, found only in Italian neighborhoods at restaurants where the ambience, if any, was supplied by drippy candles stuck in wicker-clad Chianti bottles.
Pizza went mainstream after World War II. Sherwood “Shakey” Johnson opened a little place in Sacramento, California, that begat hundreds of Shakey’s Pizza Parlors throughout the West, and Dan and Frank Carney of Wichita, Kansas, created Pizza Hut. No longer confined to cities’ ethnic enclaves, pizzerias appeared in suburbs and small towns, and going out for pizza became one of the cheap-eats pleasures of the postwar years. It remained an odd enough meal in the 1950s that an early edition of Mad magazine ran hilarious instructions explaining how to eat it without dripping cheese in your lap, but as the baby boom entered its teens, pizza became nearly as familiar—and as fun—as hot dogs and milk shakes.
Pizza today can be anything you want it to be: junk food delivered by a local franchise, low-fat or low-carb, gluten-free or vegan, a cheese-gobbed Superbowl snack or a dainty hors d’oeuvre adorned with baby vegetables, confits, and confitures.
Sameness of nationwide chains notwithstanding, the diversity of pizza styles in the United States is as striking as our nation’s wildly varied definitions of barbecue or chili. Here’s a roundup of the major venues.
CALIFORNIA
California deserves credit (or blame) for transforming pizza into boutique food. The renaissance began in the 1970s, when American gastronomes began to rediscover the pleasures of Mediterranean cuisine. Like extra-virgin olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes, pizza grew fashionable and acquired an aura of refinement. To the connoisseur, it was no longer just a mass-produced pie-in-a-cardboard-box heaped with rubbery mozzarella. Born-again pizza boasted heretofore unheard-of luxury. Its dough was made lovingly from scratch, sometimes with whole wheat flour and laced with herbs; and its toppings consisted of such deluxe groceries as shrimp, proscuitto di Parma, wild mushrooms, goat cheese, and caramelized garlic. In Hollywood, Spago’s creator, Wolfgang Puck, first got famous by feeding movie stars unimaginably opulent pizzas, including an eight-incher topped with smoked salmon and three kinds of caviar that sold for a hundred dollars. Puck’s salmon and crème fraîche toppings are still headliners, as is smoked duck sausage.
CHICAGO
Chicago pizza was born in 1941, when Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo partnered up to opened a place called Pizzeria Uno, serving a deep-dish pizza inspired by Neapolitan pizza but unique to the United States. Since then, the Second City has become second to none in pizza personality. Here you can eat double-crusters, soufflé pizzas, pizza pot pie, and ultra-thin or extra-thick pies.
Chicago’s signature pizza.
STEPHEN RUSHMORE
DETROIT
See Square Pizza
ITHACA, NEW YORK
Any hearty eater who attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in the last forty years knows about hot truck, the mobile food wagon that invented French-bread pizzas in the early 1960s. As served from the campus truck starting every night at 11 p.m. (and round-the-clock at the associated Shortstop Deli), these fusions of pizza and submarine sandwich are piled with ingredients, then baked open-face until the bread is shatteringly crisp, the cheese bubbles, and the meats sizzle.
MARYLAND PIZZA
Introduced to the Mid-Atlantic region in the 1950s at Pizza Oven, Italian Inn, Gentleman Jim’s, and Ledo (now a huge chain), Maryland pizza is medium thin with a crust that is flaky and oily, similar to Greek pizza. It is made with lots of cheese and extremely sweet tomato sauce as a large square or rectangle and cut into small slices, one thick-cut slice of pepperoni per piece. In the pizza forum at Roadfood.com, it was defended by Treetop Tom as “Not the greatest pizza you ever tasted, but sized and priced right to feed a dorm room full of hungry guys or your family on Friday night.”
MEMPHIS
If you’ve eaten barbecue spaghetti and barbecue salad in and around Memphis, barbecue pizza won’t likely come as a big surprise. At Coletta’s Italian Restaurant, a nice round pie with plenty of mozzarella is topped not with Italian sauce and sausage or pepperoni, but with heaps of barbecued pulled pork in a zesty cinnabar pit sauce. Weird as it may seem, it works wonderfully—and it is a fitting salute to the unrepressed personality of American pizza.
Barbecue pizza, Memphis, Tennessee.
NEW HAVEN
New Haven–style pizza is brittle-thin crust with a brawny edge, gilded with plenty of garlic and oil. The daddy of all Elm City pizzerias is Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana in the old Italian neighborhood on Wooster Street, where Frank Pepe began selling “tomato pies” in the 1920s. Pepe’s original pizzas were closer to what eaters today might call focaccia: broad flatbreads frosted with tomato and perhaps a few pinches of anchovy.
New Haven pizza.
NEW YORK
Across from its original location on Spring Street in New York City, Lombardi’s introduced pizza to America in 1905. In the back of the cramped storefront, pies are cooked in a brick-floor, coal-fired oven that infuses the crust with smoky savor and buoys the edge in chewy puffs. New Yorkers also are fond of pizza-by-the-slice, street food you can eat while on the stroll. At Patsy’s, uptown in Spanish Harlem, the street slice was defined seventy years ago. Customers stand around outside or lean against an open-air counter, wolfing down slices of simple, perfect pizza with a fragile crust that bends just enough so the slice can be neatly folded up one-handed, using middle finger and thumb at the edges, first finger holding down the vertex.
New York pizza.
OLD FORGE, PENNSYLVANIA
See Old Forge pizza
SOUTHWEST
It may be stretching the definition of the dish to include Southern Arizona’s Mexican pizzas in this entry, but they belong as an expression of regional character. Known as cheese crisps at Tucson’s venerable El Charro (since 1923), these Sonoran-style pies are broad circular tortillas available in minimalist form with only cheese and a scattering of cebillitos (green onions) or dressed up with such regional favorites as green chiles, guacamole, refried beans, and house-made carne seca (air-dried beef).
ST. LOUIS
St. Louis–style pizza is as thin as a saltine cracker and just as crunchy. The pies are round but traditionally cut into small rectangles that can be lifted like an hors d’oeuvre. (The crust is too rigid to bend or fold.) In addition to the ultra-thin crust, which is unleavened, Gateway City pizzas are distinguished by the use of Provel cheese, which is a tangy mixture of provolone, Cheddar, and Swiss that is virtually unheard of elsewhere.
Ultra-thin-crust St. Louis pizza. CHRIS AYERS AND AMY BRIESCH
Di Carlo’s of West Virginia applies cheese only after the cooked tomato pie comes out of the oven.
WEST VIRGINIA
Many people are surprised to learn that West Virginia has a rich, thriving pizza culture all its own, thanks to a population with a lot of Italian ancestors. (See also pepperoni roll.) Its unique style was created by Di Carlo’s, a local chain that started in Wheeling in 1949. Square, relatively thick-crusted but not pan-cooked, it is flash-baked in the oven with only sauce atop the crust. The baker pulls it out and strews it with shredded sweet provo-lone and, if desired, pepperoni discs and peppers. Although the crust’s heat will melt much of the cheese as the pizza is carried from kitchen to table, the provolone remains more like a luxurious wrap than an intrinsic part of the pie.