WTF Happened to New York Pizza?
Back in 2008 Jon Stewart rightly mocked Sarah Palin and Donald Trump for (among other things) saying they had a slice of real New York pizza at Famous Famiglia’s, a national chain suitable only for tourists and stranded airport travelers. But recently I realized that I haven’t had a slice of New York pizza better than Famiglia’s at a public restaurant for a very long time. Why?
First we need to establish what New York pizza is. It’s a single slice with Mozzarella cheese, tomato sauce, and a medium crust. You can sprinkle it with garlic, oregano, or crushed red pepper if you like, but it doesn’t come with any toppings, and it’s sold by the slice, not the pie. We can talk about Sicilian and calzones too, but for now let’s stick to the basics. A New York slice is a hot, take out food for a very reasonable amount of money that you can eat while walking down a Brooklyn street, not an entire pie served at a fine dining restaurant. You can find it in every neighborhood in the city, from Tottenville to Bedford Park. And for the last some-odd years this classic style of pizza has roundly sucked.
I do not know why New York pizza is no longer any good, but it isn’t. The cheese is weak and thin. The tomato sauce seems overly sweet, sometimes sickeningly so like someone poured sugar in it. Most objectively, the crust is wrong. It no longer holds up to the weight of even the thin layer of cheese we get in 2025. The traditional way to eat a slice is to fold it and eat it starting from pointy end of the slice. However, the slices are no longer foldable. The slice has no firmness. It flops down and drips thin sauce everywhere when you try to fold it.
Today most pizza joints barely even serve a classic cheese slice. Instead their glass cases are filled with Grandma Pizza, Vodka Pizza, Salad Pizza, Hawaiian Pizza, and even worse abominations like Buffalo Chicken Pizza, Bacon Ranch Pizza, and the most ridiculous pizza topping I have ever seen anywhere: Ziti Pizza. WTF?
I think they’re trying to cover up the poor dough and cheese they’re slopping these weird toppings onto. The effect of all these different variations (besides the sheer grossness of bacon ranch pizza) is that the pies are cold and stale. When pizzerias only served round and Sicilian, maybe white pizza if they were feeling fancy, chances were very high anything you ordered had been made in the last hour, often in the last ten minutes. If you wanted pepperoni or some other topping, the guy behind the counter would add it to your slice before he tossed it in the oven, not make an entire pie of broccoli pizza that took three days to sell.
I really don’t know what happened to make New York pizza so bad. Some great old school pizzerias have shut down and been replaced by others not as good. I’m not sure when Mike’s Pizza in the Bronx closed — maybe it didn’t make it through quarantine? — but it isn’t there any more. Famous Ray’s, the apex of the classic slice, closed in 2011 and that certainly didn’t help. Mike’s was better than anywhere else in the Bronx, and Famous Ray’s was always noticeably better than everywhere else in the city, but other pizza joints were still perfectly fine. When did that stop? Why did it stop?
Were there new regulations on the ovens that kept them from cooking right? Did something happen to the mozzarella supply? Just a guess, but maybe the pizza joints tried to hold onto the dollar slice for too long, and ended up skimping on the ingredients to meet the price point. But whatever happened, the results have been disastrous.
I have had some decent pizza here and there. A kosher pizzeria on the Upper West Side served me a tasty green olive slice a couple of weeks ago. Lions and Tigers and Squares in Chelsea serves up some pretty good Detroit style pizza, though that’s almost a completely different food, as different from New York pizza as a bagel is from a hot dog bun. Arturo’s Coal Oven still serves excellent whole pies at their sit down restaurant, but that’s quite fancy compared to the traditional New York takeout joint that can’t afford ice for the sodas. J’s on Seventh Avenue and 16th came closest with a good Sicilian slice, but their traditional triangle slice was as weak as everyone else’s.
Does anywhere still serve a good classic New York slice? If you know, please drop the location in a comment because I’m really missing it.
