Ask what pizza is in New York, Chicago and Detroit and you'll get three different answers, and each city will tell you the other two are wrong. All of them grew from the same starting point, which was Italian immigrants baking for their own neighborhoods.
We make New York-style pizza, so we have a side in this. We'll try to be fair anyway.
How pizza got started here
Pizza came to the United States with immigrants from southern Italy in the late 1800s. The first pizzerias opened in Italian neighborhoods in the Northeast, and for a long time almost nobody outside those neighborhoods ate it.
Lombardi's, on Spring Street in Manhattan, is traditionally called America's first pizzeria, with a license dated 1905. The tradition is shakier than it sounds. Researchers have found pizzerias advertising in New York before that date, and records suggest Gennaro Lombardi was a teenage employee at the time, not the founder. Either way, pizza was being sold in New York by about 1900.
It spread across the country after World War II. Pizza Hut started in Wichita, Kansas, in 1958. Little Caesars opened outside Detroit in 1959. The shop that became Domino's opened in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1960 under the name DomiNick's and took its current name in 1965. Frozen pizza reached grocery stores in the 1950s, and by 1962 brands like Totino's and Tombstone were selling it.
New York-style
The first New York pizzerias baked in coal-fired ovens and sold whole pies. The slice came later, and it came from a piece of equipment. In the 1930s a New Yorker named Frank Mastro designed a gas-fired deck oven, with the flame under a flat stone floor. It was easier to run than a coal oven. It also baked a pie that could be reheated without drying out, which a coal oven's very crisp crust couldn't manage. That made it practical to bake pies ahead and sell them one slice at a time.
A New York-style pie is large and thin. The crust is crisp on the bottom and soft enough to fold, with a light layer of sauce and low-moisture mozzarella. You eat it folded, usually standing up.
That's the style we make, in a deck oven, on Montgomery Blvd NE in Albuquerque. How we make it.
Chicago deep-dish
Deep-dish dates to 1943, when Pizzeria Uno opened in Chicago. Who came up with the recipe is still argued over. The pie is built in a tall round pan: crust pressed up the sides, then cheese, then toppings, then a chunky tomato sauce on top so the cheese doesn't burn during the long bake. It bakes for 30 to 45 minutes and you eat it with a knife and fork.
Chicagoans will point out that most of the pizza eaten there is a thin, crisp pie cut into squares, known as tavern style. Deep-dish is the famous one.
New York-style vs. Chicago
Here are the two side by side.
- Crust. New York is thin and foldable. Chicago deep-dish is thick and stands a couple of inches tall at the edge.
- Order of toppings. New York goes sauce, then cheese. Deep-dish goes cheese, then sauce.
- Bake. New York bakes on the oven's stone floor in a matter of minutes. Deep-dish bakes in a pan for half an hour or more.
- How you eat it. A New York slice is folded and eaten by hand. Deep-dish needs a plate and a fork.
Detroit-style
Detroit-style pizza started in 1946 at a bar called Buddy's Rendezvous. It's a thick rectangle baked in a steel pan of the kind the city's auto plants used to hold small parts. Wisconsin brick cheese is spread all the way to the edges, where it fries against the pan into a dark, crisp border. The sauce goes on top in stripes. A corner piece is the one to get.
New Haven
New Haven, Connecticut, calls its pizza apizza. Frank Pepe opened there in 1925, and the style hasn't changed much: a thin, chewy, oblong pie baked in a coal oven until the edges char. The plain version has tomato sauce and grated cheese and no mozzarella unless you ask for it. The white clam pie is what the city is known for.
California-style
California-style is about the toppings more than the crust. In the early 1980s, cooks in Berkeley and Los Angeles started putting goat cheese, smoked salmon and barbecue chicken on thin crusts. Wolfgang Puck's Spago opened in 1982 with a pizza maker named Ed LaDou, and California Pizza Kitchen followed in 1985 and took the idea across the country.
And in New Mexico, green chile
New Mexico doesn't have a crust of its own. It has a topping. Roasted green chile goes on pizza here the way it goes on everything else, and pepperoni and green chile is a pairing you'll see on menus around Albuquerque. Ours is called the Zia, and green chile is a topping on any pie on our menu.
Which is best?
The one you grew up with, mostly. We think a thin slice from a deck oven is hard to beat, and we would say that. If you're in Albuquerque's Northeast Heights and want to check our work, we sell pizza by the slice all day.