WHERE WAS GRANDMA PIZZA BORN?
In a 2003 piece in the Long Island newspaper Newsday, writer Erica Marcus traced grandma pizza’s origins to Umberto’s Pizzeria in New Hyde Park. According to Marcus, in the early 1970s proprietor Umberto Corteo would ask his pizza man to create a simple pizza like the one his mother used to make in Italy. The Corteos opened a second pizzeria, King Umberto’s, in nearby Elmont. It was later bought by two former Umberto’s pizza makers, who built a best-selling item out of their former boss’s favorite lunch, naming it grandma pizza sometime in the late 1980s. Within 10 years, other Long Island pizzerias were offering the pie, and a phenomenon was born.
