Why Bougie Slice Shops Are Everywhere
For fine dining chefs, New York-style pies are the next big thing
For the cover of the Off Duty section of last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I wrote about the slice shop renaissance spreading across the country (gift link here!).
Slice shops, traditionally, are bare-bones, counter-service pizza joints. More likely than not, you grew up with one in your hometown. It probably served big, floppy, cheesy slices that you’d eat sitting at a linoleum table, drinking ice water or Dr. Pepper out of one of those pebbled plastic cups. And you probably remember the name of that place to this day. (Mine was Prima Pizza.)
Now, a flurry of fine dining chefs are putting an up-market spin on the genre. Like most trends in food, this one isn’t happening at random. Restaurant labor is increasingly costly and hard to find; profit margins keep closing in, vice-like, on anyone running a traditional sit-down restaurant.
But slice shops? They turn out small menus from small spaces, using very little labor. Fine dining chefs love them not just because they’re profitable, but because pizza offers limitless opportunity to geek out on technique and ingredients. Inflation-weary customers love them because you can buy lunch and still get change from a $10 bill. And everybody loves them because they’re fun.
I was a pizza novice going into reporting this story, so I wanted to know more about the history of the New York slice. Pizza, I learned, came to New York at the turn of the 20th century along with a wave of Neapolitan immigrants. For decades, coal-fired ovens were used to turn out whole pies. The advent of gas pizza ovens beginning in the 1940s – which operated at lower temperatures, required less labor to run, and generated more consistent heat – led to New York-style pizza as the world knows it today: thin, sturdy pies large enough to be cut up and sold as big, foldable slices.
From the 50s and 60s onward, the hallmark of New York’s slice shops was their affordability and consistency, with independent players all across the city turning out freakishly similar fare. “When you open a slice shop, there’s one flour, All Trumps, that almost everyone uses,” Scott Weiner, a pizza historian and the owner of Scott’s Pizza Tours, told me. “There’s a set of tomato products that everyone uses, and two or three cheese companies.” There’s also a family tree of who learned from who, so the technique was similar across the board.
Weiner traces the current wave of artisanal upgrades as far back as the 1990s, when Di Fara, in Brooklyn, began upping the game with flourishes like olive oil and grated cheese added to their pizzas post-bake. Di Fara sells whole pies only; Artichoke Basille’s applied similar treatment to individual slices when it opened in Manhattan’s East Village in 2008. In 2010, Best Pizza, in Williamsburg, crystallized the trend with its impeccable ingredients and elevated toppings. New classics like L’Industrie, Scarr’s Pizza, and Mama’s Too followed, and the rest was history.
I ate an insane amount of delicious pizza while reporting this story, and am so happy that impeccably crafted New York slices are spreading all over the place.
Below, a cheat sheet for the new-school slice shops that really deliver.
Restaurateur Sean Feeney (Misi, Lilia, Misipasta) has had a lifelong love of neighborhood pizzerias; FINI takes things up a notch by topping its slices with best-in-class ingredients like San Marzano Gustarosso tomatoes and Salumeria Biellese pepperoni. Three percent of each shop’s revenue goes back into the surrounding community, through initiatives like youth basketball programming and street cleanups. Multiple locations in NYC (Utah is next!); slices from $4.75.
Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli (Frankie’s 457 Spuntino) opened a slice shop in a converted garage in 2019, and added a sit-down pizzeria next door in 2024. Now, they have three more locations of their pizza concept in the works. Don’t sleep on the clam pie, inspired by the frequent pizza pilgrimages that Castronovo grew up taking to New Haven with his father. 459 Court Street, Brooklyn; slices from $4.50.
Chef Wylie Dufresne (WD-50) is well known for his outside-the-box flavor combinations, so it comes as no surprise that Stretch is the place to go for offbeat pizza toppings like an “Everything Bagel” slice, or the “Old Town” pie, made with muenster cheese, garlic cream and pumpernickel crumbs. Multiple NYC locations; slices from $4.50.
Ceres opened as a slice shop, but due to overwhelming demand, it’s pivoted to selling whole pies only for the time being. Julian Geldmacher and Jake Serebnick (Eleven Madison Park) make every last one themselves, using dough made from a blend of three types of organic flour, topped with San Marzano tomatoes and aged mozzarella made just for them by the small-batch cheesemaker Jersey Girl Cheese. 164 Mott Street, New York; pies from $40.
At their two locations in San Francisco’s Chinatown and Tenderloin District, Eric Ehler and Peter Dorrance (Mister Jui’s) sell pies that run the gamut from cheffy combinations the “Orchard,” with fresh shiitake, trumpet, and cremini mushrooms, to the “Football Pie” – “a plain cheese pizza you and the homies can toss back while watching your favorite game.” Two SF locations; slices from $4.50.
Ryan Pollnow and Thomas McNaughten’s debut restaurant, Flour + Water, has become an SF icon. At their North Beach and Mission Rock pizza shops, you can choose from a menu of 13-inch pies or go for “the Big Slice” – a mammoth, folded wedge of pizza available in margherita and pepperoni versions, as well as a rotating third option. Two SF locations; slices from $8.
When Zak Fishman and James Starr set out to make New York-style pizza in LA, they learned from the best – literally. Frank Pinello, who helped kick off the new wave slice movement at Best Pizza in Williamsburg in 2010, helped Fishman and Starr develop their dough program. The first Prime Pizza opened in 2014, and the business has since expanded to eight locations.
Multiple LA locations; slices from $4.
Danny Boy’s Famous Original Pizza
Daniel Holzman says when he opened Danny Boy’s, he set out to make “pizza authentic to 1996 New York,” which translates to a tightly edited menu of classics like pepperoni, meatball, and a white pie with mushrooms. A specialty “buffalo chicken” pie with house-made buffalo hot sauce, breaded chicken, mozzarella and ricotta cheese is as experimental as it gets. Two LA locations; slices from $5;
Honorable mentions also to St. Pizza in New Orleans and LaSorted’s in LA. They’re not helmed by fine dining vets, but they’re doing beautiful things with the New York slice.
Do you know an amazing, unsung pizza shop that belongs on this list? What did I miss? Drop your recommendations in the comments.
Andy’s Pizza in DC!!!
It’s truly an arms race for how long you can ferment your sourdough crust at this point.