There’s a pie in the sky and it was coal fired in New Haven. In the early days of the new year, we’ve seen a rising interest in the art of the “Ah-beetz,” New Haven’s distinctive style of pizza. Our neighboring New York City has spent millennia wearing the pizza crown, but one thing is clear – there is only one place to find authentic New Haven style pizza.
In November of 2023, legacy publication The New Yorker published a feature story titled, “The Lasting Pleasures of New Haven Pizza.” The journalist, a New Haven native, traced the history of the apizza, writing, “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an influx of Italian immigrants, mostly from Naples, arrived to work at factories like Sargent & Co., a manufacturer of locks and hardware; in the nineteen-tens, New Haven had the highest per-capita Italian American population of any city in the U.S. Small, family-owned bakeries, many of them serving simple, inexpensive pizza made in brick ovens, proliferated in Wooster Square and beyond.”
Those early pies are not so different from the ones being served as you read this. New Haven apizza is known for its thin crust with smoky char, its mouth watering droop, and its inventive array of toppings. Local haunt BAR was actually the first to create a mashed potato pie, a must try for any pizzaiolo.
In the early days of 2024, New Haven apizza was once again given its flowers flours, this time in the venerable New York Times. The story, titled “The Quest to Unlock New Haven’s Pizza Moment,” followed a food reporter and New Haven resident through the “Big Three,” Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, Sally’s Apizza, and Modern Apizza. The writer traces the recent boom in interest around New Haven style pizza, citing longer lines and buzzier hype over the last few years.
This amplified attention has created a demand for New Haven style apizza in other parts of the country. At the tail end of 2023, Sally’s Apizza opened a new location in Woburn, Massachusetts to a roar of Bostonian joy. The influence of the New Haven pizza is spreading rapidly, but the fact is, New Haven style pizza is best enjoyed in New Haven.
All year round, visitors and locals alike come together for city-wide apizza tours, led by local historian Colin Caplan. Caplan and his team at Taste of New Haven have spent more than 13 years spreading the word about our pies and creating lifelong apizza aficionados.
If you’ve made any “no pizza resolutions” this year, now would be a good time to break those. And if you’ve never shared a pie with a New Haven local before, then take it from The New York Times, “next time you’re passing through the ‘greatest small city in America,’ pull off the highway and have a slice. I promise you’ll get the hype.”
