Pizza came of age in eighteenth-century Naples as flatbread for the poor — cheap, quick, eaten in the street, and sneered at by more than one nineteenth-century writer, which is exactly why a queen eating it made such a good story. In 1889, the story goes, Margherita of Savoy, queen of a country unified only a generation before, visited Naples and was served three pizzas by Raffaele Esposito; the one she liked best was topped with tomato, mozzarella and basil, and he named it after her. The colours are real enough: red sauce, white cheese and green basil are the colours of the Italian flag. The rest is harder to hold. The only document, a royal thank-you letter dated June 1889 that still hangs in Pizzeria Brandi, was taken apart by the historian Zachary Nowak, who found the seal in the wrong place, a signature that matches nothing in the Italian archives, and the pizza-maker’s name written wrong. No newspaper reported the visit, and both the tale and the name Margherita were first promoted in the 1930s and 1940s.
By then the people who brought pizza to New York had long since arrived, and most of them would not have called themselves Italian. The South had been annexed to the new kingdom in 1860 and governed and taxed from Piedmont, in the far north, and the emigrants who left it held to something older and smaller: campanilismo, loyalty to everyone within the sound of your own village’s church bell. Little Italy was settled street by street on exactly those lines. Mulberry Street was Neapolitan; Mott Street between Broome and Grand was Calabrian; Hester Street came from Apulia. Pizza was not a national dish carried across the Atlantic. It was the taste of one particular city, landing on a handful of particular blocks.
Its founding in New York is a story of hand-offs rather than firsts. Lombardi’s still tells the tale of a licence granted to Gennaro Lombardi in 1905, but no one has ever found it, and the pizza historian Peter Regas, working through immigration papers and Italian-language newspapers, found that Lombardi first landed in November 1904, aged seventeen and listed as a labourer — an employee in 1905 at most, not an owner. The man behind it appears to have been Filippo Milone, who opened pizzerias across Manhattan and Brooklyn, sometimes registered as groceries or bakeries, and handed them on as he moved to the next. The records show that John’s of Bleecker Street was one of his, opened in 1915 and taken over by John Sasso a decade later. The Spring Street shop, in turn, trained the men who spread the trade: Antonio “Totonno” Pero left in 1924 for Coney Island, and Pasquale Lancieri learned there before opening Patsy’s in East Harlem in 1933.
Naples bakes with wood. New York, at the turn of the century, ran on anthracite coal, and it was cheaper, so the first American pizza ovens burned it. They were bread ovens first, huge and hungry for air, often built into a building’s foundations, and they baked a pie that was Neapolitan in idea and something else in the fire — thinner, drier, firmer, charred in a way Naples never intended. John’s is the clearest surviving example of that hybrid. A romantic story says new coal ovens were later outlawed and only the old ones survive by grandfather clause; Scott Wiener, a pizza historian who leads tours of the city’s pizzerias, went looking for the law and found none. Coal simply lost the argument, and after Arturo’s opened on Houston Street in 1957, no new coal pizzeria opened in the city for more than thirty years.
Gas won it. Natural gas reached the ovens in the 1930s, first as burners fitted into old coal ovens and then, from the 1940s, in the compact steel deck ovens that became standard. They ran some three hundred degrees cooler, and the lower heat changed the pizza: a crust that kept more of its moisture could sit in a display case and be reheated without turning brittle, which is all the slice needs. Patsy’s claims to have sold the first one, and the claim has never been proved or disproved. What is certain is that after the Second World War the slice shop was everywhere, and New York had found its form: a meal for one, bought in a minute, folded down the middle and eaten on the move by a city that never had time to sit down.
Which brings us to now, and this is, without much argument, the best time there has ever been to eat pizza in New York. A generation of pizzaioli — the Italian word for pizza-makers — has become obsessive about everything the old shops took for granted. They talk about flour the way winemakers talk about soil, blending grains and milling their own; they ferment dough for days on wild starters; they filter the water; they source tomatoes and cheese with the care of a restaurant kitchen and then sell the result for a few dollars on a paper plate. In the last few years the city has produced the country’s best pizzeria and its best slice shop, both on this list. The coal ovens are still burning. The slice has never been better. And Naples, at last, is being taken on its own terms.