Pilgrimage-worthy pizza: 5 great regional styles in the USA

Larry Olmsted Special to USA TODAY

Published 8:08 AM EDT Oct 17, 2018

The scene: Pizza is arguably America’s favorite food, and if a town or city has any restaurants at all, there is a good chance one of them is a pizzeria. But exactly what kind of pizza they serve depends quite a bit on where in the country you are – the United States has more different regional styles of pizza than Italy, the birthplace of the cuisine. Thick and thin; round and rectangular; cooked with coal, gas, wood or electricity; there are a lot of different ways to enjoy a food that is as simple as cooked dough topped with tomato sauce (usually) and cheese (not always) and any of a kazillion other things, from the national favorite, pepperoni, to fresh clams to pineapples.

Over the years, Great American Bites has visited a lot of different kinds of pizzerias in a lot of different places. There are more than five distinct styles in this vast nation, but these are five great ones that you need to try to call yourself a pizza lover, with a standout recommendation for where to thoroughly enjoy each.

The food: There is no “best” style, and eaters are most often polarized between the various crusts. But at the end of day there’s very little truly bad pizza (if you avoid the cheap delivery chains like Dominos, Little Caesars, Pizza Hut, etc.). Even when trying a style different from your favorite, you can have a really good time, so when you visit one of these pizza capitals, make sure you grab a slice or two.

New York style

America’s very first pizzeria was in the Big Apple, and ever since, this is the city best known for having a distinctive style (well, other than Naples), the kind most fast food pizza all across the nation is copied from, albeit usually very poorly. Even in the City That Never Sleeps, traditional neighborhood New York-style pizza has been fast disappearing in recent decades, squeezed out between the cheap national chains and the emergence of the gourmet wood-fired craze. True classic New York pizza is always cooked with gas, usually at temperatures quite a bit lower than that used in wood- or coal-burning ovens. As result, New York-style pizza is unique because it has a thin crust, but it’s not crispy, it's chewy, sturdy enough to support the slice held in one hand, yet still flexible enough to fold without shattering – old-time New Yorkers fold their slices and eat them like a sandwich, with crust on the outside of every bite. It has a pronounced outer crust that is raised and airy, very three-dimensional in comparison to the rest of the otherwise thin slice.

The best place to try truly great New York pizza is Di Fara in Brooklyn, which I hardly discovered – pretty much every paper, major food critic and the Zagat Survey has rated it the city’s best. You have to travel out of the way and wait a long time because it is a food pilgrimage and very popular, but it’s worth the hassle because it is awesome, and anyone who thinks Di Fara is overrated is wrong. While they make the city’s classic style, they do it with much better ingredients than the typical neighborhood spot, like a three-cheese blend of fresh buffalo mozzarella, fior di latte and Parmigiano-Reggiano, with flour and olive oil from Italy and basil the owner grows himself. However, I ate at the satellite in Las Vegas and it was terrible, nothing like the original.

There is a second minor style that is also uniquely New York: Sicilian (you won’t find it in Sicily), a rectangular sheet pie with much thicker, bread-like crust and corners. Di Fara also makes the city’s best Sicilian. Di Fara calls them “square pies,” and the dough is airier then most Sicilian, not as oppressively thick and heavy. A great example of the less rarefied neighborhood pizzeria once common all throughout the city is Pizza Sam’s in Jackson Heights, Queens, my childhood regular and the last of about a dozen pizzerias in my old neighborhood still standing.

Chicago deep dish

This is the other pizza famously named for a city, and one that is often the butt of jokes by East Coasters. However, I am from New York City and I love Chicago deep dish. You just have to accept that it’s different. If traditional thin-crust styles are spaghetti or fettucine, then deep dish is lasagna, a casserole take on the genre. You never get it by the slice, it takes forever to cook, and because it is in the oven so long, the tomato sauce always goes on top of the cheese, no matter what topping you choose, because it keeps the cheese from burning. It’s cooked in a cast iron pan about 2 inches deep, lined with dough to form vertical outside edges, and then filled with tomato sauce, cheese and whatever toppings are desired. It is removed from the pan with a special spatula and eaten with fork and knife. By tradition, Chicago is a meat-centric former stockyard city, and all forms of meat rule here, but especially sausage. Unlike pizzerias elsewhere, link-style sausage is uncommon, and the ground patty form is much more prevalent, often as a single-disc layer the diameter of the pizza.

There are several popular multiple-restaurant groups around Illinois, but my favorite is Lou Malnati’s, and all my Chicago friends tell me I made the right choice. The bestsellers are the Chicago Classic, with sausage and cheese, and the Lou, a four-cheese blend of mozzarella, cheddar, parmigiana, and Romano with spinach and mushrooms. Pizzas here come in four sizes, from individual to the large serving four, but it’s the crust that sets Lou Malnati’s above its peers, rich and decadent yet light, flaky and very buttery, more like pie crust than traditional pizza dough.

“What is deep-dish pizza?” asked owner Marc Malnati rhetorically. “First I tell people what it isn’t. People come in thinking it’s this big pile of ingredients, heavy and hard to eat. But it’s not. We’re going for a thin crust, but it has to be thick enough to hold all the sausage, a pound of cheese and all the tomato. It’s a container that we make as light as possible. It’s all about the crust: a flaky, buttery crust is the foundation we build on. The crust has got to be perfect. Then it is about the right ingredients – we’re meticulous about managing every ingredient.”

Coal oven/New Haven style

Coal-oven pizza is most famously associated with New Haven, Connecticut, a pizza lovers’ paradise, but Totonno’s in New York predates this, and there are several other famous coal-fired pizzerias around the country. What they have in common is a thin crust that cooks quickly like wood-fired Neapolitan, but with a bit more char, adding smoky flavor. New Haven is the best place to try the style as the city is home to four famous places in a concise area: Frank Pepe Pizza Napoletana, or simply Pepe’s, Sally’s Apizza, Modern Pizza and the Spot, a very old and established Pepe’s spin-off.

Many prominent national critics and pizza experts believe Pepe’s is the best pizzeria in the city and possibly the entire country, and everyone I have taken there has been suitably blown away. The pizza is amazing, and while there is a locally divided Sally’s vs. Pepe’s rivalry (everyone seems to agree they love Modern), Pepe’s is so much better that I cannot understand why there is even debate. Pepe’s pizza is spectacular – pies are large and sort of oblong rather than round, with as thin a crust as you will find, crisp and blackened on bottom from the coal oven. The traditional is a tomato-based pizza with only grated cheese, no mozzarella (though it’s an option), and while the crust is crisp to start with, this version is so saucy it droops in the middle and cannot easily be eaten one-handed like New York slices. But the trademark, since the 1930s, is the famed white clam pizza, a style invented right there, and served only when fresh New England clams are available. Other standard toppings like pepperoni are available, but the clam is crazy good, while if you want to compare to more traditional pizzas, the tomato pie, with or without mozzarella, is amazing.

In recent years Pepe’s has expanded greatly with 10 locations throughout the Northeast, from as close to New York City as Yonkers to Boston, Providence and even in the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. I took home a pie from the one in West Hartford, and it was impressive. However, as chains go, Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza, out of Florida but now in eight states and throughout the Northeast and Illinois, is amazing. In 2016, Great American Bites called it “America’s Best Pizza Chain.” I still stand by that.

Detroit style

This is all the rage right now, and while until very recently it was almost completely unknown outside the Motor City, Detroit pizza is having its moment in hipster hotpots like Brooklyn, Nashville and San Francisco. This recognition has been long overdue, and while I said earlier that there is no perfect style of pizza, this is as close as it comes, bringing together all the pizza fans divided by various other crust styles. It’s thick and rectangular like New York Sicilian, but not that thick, much less bready, so the toppings are not overwhelmed. The exterior of the dough is crispy, giving it a nice mouth snap like coal oven. It just ticks off all the right boxes to please the palate, and everyone I’ve seen try it for the first time has been wowed. It also seems to be a style that anyone who bothers to tackle does well, and I’ve yet to find a bad example of Detroit pizza. Specialists we have visited include Brown Dog Pizza in Telluride, Colorado; Emmy Squared in New York and Nashville; Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco, and his Pizza Rock spin-offs in Las Vegas and Sacramento, and all have knocked it out of the ballpark.

But the place to really experience it is the place where it was invented, Buddy’s Pizza in Detroit. Rectangular pies are available as either four- or eight-slice pizzas, and the four is always better because you get all double-crusted corner pieces. The pizza has a tenuous connection to the city’s auto industry, as it is traditionally cooked in pans of blue steel, and legend has it that at one time cooks used industrial metal trays meant to hold small parts in factories. The pizza is delicious, and Buddy’s thing is combos based on Detroit names, like the Henry Ford (red onion, ground beef, bacon, bleu cheese), the Detroit Zoo (roasted tomatoes, pine nuts, basil) or the bestselling Detroiter, which features pepperoni, cheese, tomato basil sauce and Buddy’s signature spice blend.

Neapolitan

This style is based on the world’s very first pizza, the progenitor of the entire field, from Naples, Italy. To make sure people get the real thing, nearly 35 years ago a group of renowned pizzaiolos in Naples created a set of quality rules for making their namesake pizza, much as wine regions like Champagne have done. They certify pizzerias around the world, which become members of the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana, or association of true Neapolitan pizza, commonly abbreviated as VPN. If you go to one of these VPN places, you will get predictably excellent pizza made using only permitted types of Italian flour, other very specific ingredients, and a particular kind of high-temperature wood-burning oven. There are well over 100 VPN-certified pizzerias in this country, and Great American Bites particularly enjoyed Il Canal in Washington, D.C. But the finest example of the style is not a VPN spot; it is the legendary Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, which has been named the best pizza in America by more critics than any other. The over-the-top pizza-obsessed chef-owner Chris Bianco hires artisan farmers to grow arugula, basil and other key ingredients for him. Everything is as perfect and fresh as possible, though in recent years, Bianco, who used to literally make every pizza served himself, has stepped back a bit from tossing pies. But the oven, farmers, ingredients, and from-scratch sausage are all still there, and this is life-changing pizza.

Special note: Great American Bites has gone on record as saying that Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco is the best pizzeria in the country, if not the world, and it is. While there is no one best pizza, there can be a best pizzeria, and Tony’s special touch is making all the top styles under one roof, with seven different ovens using every fuel to turn out the best and most authentic versions of nine distinctly different regional styles of pizza. On top of that, owner Tony Gemingnani was the first American ever to win the title of World Champion Pizza Maker in Naples. He offers a pizza-tasting trip around the world on menu and all are excellent – his New Haven coal style is as good as in New Haven, his Detroit as good as Detroit. Tony offers all the styles in this story save for Chicago deep dish – which he does an excellent version of at his other pizzeria, Capo, down the street.

Larry Olmsted has been writing about food and travel for more than 15 years. An avid eater and cook, he has attended cooking classes in Italy, judged a barbecue contest and once dined with Julia Child. Follow him on Twitter, @TravelFoodGuy, and if there's a unique American eatery you think he should visit, send him an email at travel@usatoday.com. Some of the venues reviewed by this column provided complimentary services.

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