Pizza in America has by no means been higher. The wood-fire Neapolitan pizzerias that took off within the early 2000s, and have been spreading ever since, taught Individuals to ask extra of a dish they already cherished.
The following craft pizza renaissance is a uncommon culinary convergence: born of metropolitan chef tradition however not confined to large cities. There are nice pizzerias nearly in all places in the US, from small New England cities to the Mississippi Delta to rural Iowa to Los Angeles to Alaska. They usually’re being opened by cooks from an unusually big selection of backgrounds.
The result’s a dish that has change into a cooking model of its personal, channeling a seemingly limitless variety of cultures and concepts.
The next record is a highway map to a uniquely American phenomenon — and proof, maybe, that the nation is house to the world’s greatest pizza. BRETT ANDERSON
Hamtramck, Mich. (Pop. 27,834)
The thought of utilizing Bangladeshi elements at Amar Pizza was born of necessity. “We’re in a neighborhood the place there are pizzerias that had been round 20 to 30 years,” mentioned Khurshed Ahmed, Amar’s proprietor. “We needed to give you one thing distinctive, to separate us.” Essentially the most scrumptious of the ensuing innovations: a pizza made with a dried fish paste based mostly on a condiment that was a dinner-table staple in Mr. Ahmed’s family when he was rising up. This principally takeout restaurant has been in Hamtramck since 2010, lengthy sufficient for its Bangladeshi pizzas — you’ll additionally need one sparked with Naga chiles — to change into domestically well-known, and for good purpose. There’s a second location in Troy, owned by Mr. Ahmed’s brother Albor Alam. BRETT ANDERSON
Charlotte, N.C. (Pop. 874,579)
The American craft-pizza increase was fueled by small Neapolitan pies fired in wood-burning ovens. Kerrel Thompson is among the many pizzaiolos who responded to the ensuing demand for higher high quality by attempting to excellent a special form of pizza. In Mr. Thompson’s case, it’s a New York model paying homage to what he grew up consuming in Cleveland. At Fowl, operated by Mr. Thompson and his spouse, Nkem, the pizzas are of a shareable dimension, that includes browned, caramelized crusts, and out there with seasonal toppings like dandelion pesto and native mushrooms. The Thompsons discovered an enthusiastic native viewers for Fowl’s pizza: Since opening in December 2021, the restaurant has grown from a pop-up to a takeout enterprise to (as of subsequent month) a sit-down restaurant. BRETT ANDERSON
The overlapping expertise required to make beer and dough have spurred a rising variety of brewers to strive their palms at pizza. This restaurant-within-a-brewery is an inspiring instance. The crusts are aromatic and flavorful, with sturdy undercarriages, and the Neapolitan pizzas are at all times memorable, whether or not they’re topped with the barest quantity of elements (order at the very least one with tomato sauce and yuzu oil) or the makings of a German potato salad, to call only one within the endless parade of specialty pies. On Tuesdays, the kitchen options its tackle Chicago’s square-cut tavern-style pies (proven above). The meals is an effective match for the beer and, sure, wine, which Center Forehead began making, from Michigan grapes, in 2019. BRETT ANDERSON
Nashville (Pop. 689,447)
Can pizza be Southern? Can Italian meals? The reply is sure, at the very least once you’re consuming at Metropolis Home. The restaurant, opened by the chef Tandy Wilson in 2007, helped trailblaze the pizzeria-as-Italian-American-trattoria. On the similar time, it confirmed how properly Southern elements and recipes take to Italian delicacies. If it’s tomato season in Tennessee — as it’s proper now — hold an eye fixed out for pizza impressed by Mr. Tandy’s mom’s favourite tomato sandwich (above), or one dotted with morsels of the juicy peaches that ripen across the similar time. The kitchen is equally adept at handmade pastas and different Italian-inspired dishes. BRETT ANDERSON
Portland, Ore. (Pop. 652,503)
It’s been mentioned that Portland, Ore., is the greatest pizza metropolis within the nation. Some could argue, however there’s no query that there are some nice pies out there right here (together with these made by Sarah Minnick at Beautiful’s Fifty Fifty). However a couple of miles to the west, in Beaverton, Aaron Truong and his spouse and co-owner, Natalie, are including to the scene. Began as a farmers’ market pop-up with only a single Gozney Roccbox countertop oven, Hapa discovered a everlasting house final yr. True to its title — a time period for multiracial folks of Asian or Pacific Islander descent — the restaurant works in a number of culinary traditions. The pies keep trustworthy to the Neapolitan canon of pleasingly charred and chewy dough, but in addition to vivid Asian flavors, as within the pho or Thai inexperienced curry pies. Mr. Truong manages to get so much on his pizzas with out them seeming gimmicky or overloaded. BRIAN GALLAGHER
Juneau, Alaska (Pop. 32,255)
“Lupo,” as locals name it, consists of a small deli, a kitchen and an off-the-cuff 50-person eating room, situated in a downtown constructing that has housed bakeries since 1914. Greater than half the time, in Alaska’s forested, seaside capital metropolis, it’s both raining exhausting or raining not so exhausting. Tucking into the bar, the place you possibly can watch your pizza’s crust bubble and caramelize within the wood-fired oven, is a primo approach to dry out. The chef Beau Schooler, who has half a dozen James Beard nods, makes pizzas with flours from the Pacific Northwest, Caputo Brothers Creamery cheese from Pennsylvania and basic toppings like fennel sausage, bacon, pepperoni and mushrooms. Hold an eye fixed out for particular pizzas, too, like halibut and asparagus, relying on what’s coming in from fishermen and farms. And if you happen to’re fortunate, you would possibly catch a glimpse of Harold, the resident parking-lot raven, roosted up by the entrance door. JULIA O’MALLEY
Cleveland, Miss. (Pop. 11,199)
The pizza at Leña collapses the space between Naples, Italy, the place Marisol Doyle, the restaurant’s chef and co-owner, studied pizza making; the Mississippi Delta, her adopted house; and Sonora, Mexico, the place she was born and raised. The menu contains pies you’d anticipate finding at a contemporary Neapolitan pizzeria, like margherita and pepperoni (named pepperrory, after Ms. Doyle’s husband and enterprise accomplice, Rory). However there are additionally pies highlighting seasonal produce and Ms. Doyle’s Mexican heritage, together with an al pastor pizza (pineapple comes on the facet) and the Sonoran, which replaces tomato sauce with refried beans and is topped with housemade roasted jalapeño salsa. Leña is paying homage to many city trattorias, besides that it sits in a storefront on a small-town major avenue referred to as Cotton Row. BRETT ANDERSON
Mount Vernon, Iowa (Pop. 4,527)
The scene is so acquainted contained in the Lincoln — the chalkboard menu, the pure wine, the 30-somethings evaluating notes about their favourite podcasts — a customer may simply overlook they’re in a small city on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids. However you received’t overlook for lengthy. There’s an excessive amount of Iowa on the wood-fired pies: native morels and asparagus within the spring and summer time, Iowa pepperoni and scorching honey all yr lengthy. The “barn chives” come from the outdated pumpkin farm the place the proprietor Jesse Sauerbrie’s father lives. Mr. Sauerbrie, who first discovered the restaurant enterprise working at Crimson Lobster, relishes Lincoln’s skill to increase clients’ horizons. “Pizza is a very nice approach to get folks to strive new issues,” he mentioned. BRETT ANDERSON
Baltimore (Pop. 854,535)
It isn’t stunning that Robbie Tutlewski determined to place soft-shell crab on pizza. Little Donna’s — which made The New York Instances’s 2023 record of the nation’s most enjoyable eating places — is in Baltimore, in any case. Right here, crab is an all-but-mandatory menu merchandise. And the soft-shells actually take to the remedy. They’re pan-fried, quartered after which scattered atop a cooked white pizza, the place their buttery juices settle into the cheese. The seasonal particular is only one instance of how Mr. Tutlewski channels a lifetime’s price of experiences by his pizzeria. He discovered to make Neapolitan-style pizza working on the influential Pizzeria Bianco (see under), however the crusts on Little Donna’s pies are cracker-thin, in homage to the tavern-style pies of Mr. Tutlewski’s native Indiana. Situated within the former house of a beloved native tavern, the restaurant comes by its homespun heat truthfully: Mr. Tutlewski lives together with his household upstairs, and the non-pizza portion of the menu contains dishes impressed by the cooking of his Yugoslavian grandmother. BRETT ANDERSON
Phoenix (Pop. 1,608,139)
Chris Bianco helped set up the persona of the pizzaiolo-as-pitmaster — the meticulous craftsman spinning magic from wooden fireplace. He did it at Pizzeria Bianco, the place beginning within the late Nineteen Eighties, he helped pave the best way for the craft-pizza revolution one steamy-crisp, handmade pizza at a time. His profile has solely grown, alongside together with his empire, however the two Phoenix pizzerias are nonetheless price a pilgrimage. You should definitely order the Rosa, a sublimely austere pizza holding Arizona pistachios, rosemary and singed slices of purple onion. BRETT ANDERSON
Los Angeles (Pop. 10,014,009)
William Joo, who immigrated from South Korea as an adolescent, attracts inspiration from the Tokyo neo-Neapolitan college of pizza for his very Los Angeles pies, proofed over the course of two days and embellished with produce from the Santa Monica Farmers Market. The menu makes a phenomenal Neapolitan pizza and a white pie coated solely with a swirl of thick cream and fior di latte mozzarella, freckled with preserved lemon and obscenely giant glugs of olive oil. However a part of the enjoyable of Sei is in its specials and one-off pizzas that come and go, and would possibly embody beef tongue, squash blossoms or yuzu. TEJAL RAO
Mountain Brook, Ala. (Pop. 22,461)
Put up Workplace Pies got here to better Birmingham when John Corridor decided that his greatest path out of Manhattan’s rat race, the place he labored in among the metropolis’s most prestigious eating places, was to carry craft pizza to his hometown. The Neapolitan pies are expertly made, typically highlighting native produce; one attracts on the accomplice Brandon Cain’s expertise with Southern barbecue. Mr. Corridor spends much less time in Alabama since opening Restaurant Lola in Bremerton, Wash., a chance, he mentioned, that may not have been doable had he not first gone into enterprise for himself. “If we had traders, they by no means would have let me go away,” he mentioned. “However we didn’t need assistance to make nice pizza.” BRETT ANDERSON
Jersey Metropolis, N.J. (Pop. 291,657)
What if New Jersey is known as a misplaced province of Italy? That is the query requested by Razza, Dan Richer’s locavore pizzeria in Jersey Metropolis. The flour is milled close by. Milk for butter and cheese is contributed by native cows. What could also be Razza’s most well-known creation is a white pie topped with honey from New Jersey bees and toasted, blight-resistant hazelnuts grown in East Brunswick by plant biologists at Rutgers College. Pizza is many issues in the US, however few pizzerias have gotten so far as Razza does by treating pizza as an agricultural product. PETE WELLS
Brooklyn (Pop. 2,736,074)
Roberta’s took California delicacies’s open-minded angle about pizza and gave it a New York edge. When it opened, in 2008, it had no apparent guidelines about what it will placed on the wheels of dough baked in its candy-apple-red oven. There was a pizza with tuna, one other with bacon and eggs and a pineapple-topped model of Hawaiian pizza referred to as the Da Kine. It sounded at occasions like a dorm-room joke, however the smoky, blistered crust was glorious and the elements first-rate. (The “bacon” was house-cured guanciale.) The menu is extra conventional lately, however the metropolis is filled with pizzerias that took the Roberta’s method and ran wild with it. PETE WELLS
Berkeley, Calif. (Pop. 118,962)
In a spot the place you possibly can’t swing a pie with out hitting a fermentation-happy sourdough pizza joint, Rose stands aside. The pies put out by the married couple Gerad Gobel and Alexis Rorabaugh, who labored collectively in Chicago for seven years, draw from each the New York and Midwestern tavern traditions. The crust is sturdy sufficient — no level flop right here — which you could single-hand your slice. The toppings aren’t flashy, however choices just like the She Wolf, with burrata, garlic confit, olives, capers and oregano, are deeply scrumptious. For a real California pizza-parlor expertise, snag a desk on the charming patio out again. BRIAN GALLAGHER
New Orleans (Pop. 383,997)
The place are American pizza eating places heading? St. Pizza suggests an interesting path. It’s a slice place, with a sidewalk takeout window, that includes the form of crisp, sparely appointed pizza that the co-owner Tony Biancosino ate rising up in southern New Jersey, exterior Philadelphia. However there’s extra. Stroll previous the money register and right into a partly hidden, seductively lit tavern, the place those self same glorious pizzas — topped with housemade fennel sausage, with in-season greens and candy ricotta, with crushed tomatoes, oregano and fennel pollen — are served as entire pies, supplied in two sizes. They’re the spine of what quantities to a red-sauce Italian place stripped to its necessities and polished to go well with trendy tastes. The restaurant — which Mr. Biancosino opened early this yr with Leslie Pariseau, his enterprise accomplice and spouse, and one other accomplice, Abhi Bhansali — is 2 doorways down from Patron Saint, the couple’s store and bar specializing in low-intervention wines. So sure, you possibly can take pleasure in your pizza, and no matter else, with a bottle of Slovenian pet-nat rosé. BRETT ANDERSON
Philadelphia (Pop. 1,550,542)
When Valentin Palillero and his spouse, Eva Mendez, opened their South Philadelphia pizzeria in 2005, the couple bought conventional pies, with toppings like pepperoni and inexperienced peppers that had been acquainted to their traditionally Italian neighborhood. However Mr. Palillero, who emigrated from Puebla, Mexico, additionally wished to enchantment to his personal group that had been settling within the surrounding blocks for the final decade or so. Utilizing the identical easy crust as a base, new recipes used elements present in Mexican delicacies: barely smoky guajillo sauce, spiced pork, black beans, flecks of onion and chopped cilantro. These days, these varieties, served with a facet of lime wedges, are as standard because the originals. However they’re additionally a vivid hyperlink in a neighborhood that’s been an epicenter of Italian and Mexican immigration, roughly three-quarters of a century aside. REGAN STEPHENS
It will be an understatement to name Scratch a product of its setting. Perched on the sloping fringe of a forest in deep Southern Illinois, the brewery was constructed partly from salvaged native supplies. The out of doors brick oven was handmade, and it’s used to bake wood-fired pizza, served Thursday to Sunday. The crusts are made with the identical sourdough tradition used to ferment the superb bread and a lot of the beers. The elements for the pizza are largely native (similar goes for the beer), a lot of it grown or foraged by the co-owners Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon on land surrounding the property. To say this place is price its personal highway journey is one other understatement. BRETT ANDERSON
Gloucester, Mass. (Pop. 29,729)
Quick & Essential is a Neapolitan pizzeria crossed with a New England oyster bar. Go to it as soon as, and also you’ll battle to think about the way it may very well be anything. The restaurant is so near the waterfront, you’re prone to discover sea gulls resting on vehicles parked out entrance. That proximity is mirrored within the seafood choices, particularly the uncooked oysters. After you slurp down some briny, impeccably contemporary Island Creeks, earlier than tearing into one of many restaurant’s flame-kissed pies, you’ll want this explicit model of surf and turf had been extra broadly out there. BRETT ANDERSON
Bristol, Vt. (Pop. 3,782)
In one other period, you may be nearly assured a spot just like the Tillerman — a rural inn and restaurant in an 18th-century farmhouse — would provide contemporary popovers, stew and an evening’s sleep below a home made quilt. Rustic comforts — raging fires within the winter, dwell music night time by the barn in summer time — stay central to the enchantment right here, however they’ve been married to a more energizing culinary aesthetic since Jason Kirmse and Kate Baron took over the property. The couple, who beforehand labored in meals and hospitality within the Bay Space, put in a wood-fire oven. That’s the place you’ll discover Kelsey Martin, who doubles because the restaurant’s pastry chef, and the sous-chef Taylor Adams (above) tending to crisp-edged pizzas that change with the seasons. BRETT ANDERSON
Washington, D.C. (Pop. 689,545)
When Michael Rafidi determined to create a pizza pop-up at his Georgetown bakery throughout Covid lockdowns, it wasn’t an particularly tough pivot. The kitchen was already geared up with a wood-fire oven for pita bread. Mr. Rafidi discovered himself deploying harissa and different elements he encountered making pizza-adjacent dishes, like sfeehas and manoushe, together with his Palestinian grandparents whereas rising up. The response was so optimistic that Mr. Rafidi turned Yellow, a Levantine bakery, right into a Levantine pizzeria by night time referred to as (not) pizza. The title accounts for a way far elements like soujek, jibneh and toum stray from Italy. No matter you name them, the savory pies rival any craft pizza you’ll discover. Don’t overlook to avoid wasting room for some labneh soft-serve. BRETT ANDERSON
Minneapolis (Pop. 429,954)
Nowhere is the freewheeling artistic spirit permeating American pizza tradition extra pronounced than within the Twin Cities. Argentine pizza? Japanese-Italian pizza? Indian pizza? Spiffed-up Midwestern tavern pizza? So it’s no nice shock that one of many area’s most glorious eating places can also be a pizzeria. Or maybe it’s higher to say that Younger Joni, the place in query, isn’t simply a pizzeria. The menu is full of not solely wood-fired pizzas but in addition many different non-pizza dishes, lots of which draw on the Korean American childhood of Ann Kim, Younger Joni’s chef and co-owner. A typical unfold right here contains galbi-style quick rib pizza, chili-glazed prawns and a trio of housemade kimchis. The restaurant, in a former Polish group middle, is notably atmospheric. Take into account reserving seats for pre- or post-dinner drinks within the connected Again Bar, a speakeasy whose design transports you to a country cabin within the higher Midwest. BRETT ANDERSON
