New York City needs pizza the same way a plant needs sunlight or a subway needs a conductor. In other words, it’s important – and that’s why we spent several months looking for the best pizza in the city. Throughout our research, we consumed several hundred slices and many dozens of pies, and, at one point or another, most of us had thoughts like “That’s enough” and “I’d like to never eat pizza again.” After that, we went through grueling rounds of discussion, deliberation, and voting. And that’s how we ended up here: with a definitive list of the top 20 pizza places in NYC, ranked. Before you get into this top 20, however, you should know that it only applies to the individual pizzas – it’s not a ranking of the restaurants on the whole. Now that we’ve provided this disclaimer, go read about (and eat) some incredible pizza.
Leo
ach and every time we update our guides to the best bread products, this Williamsburg restaurant is involved. Pizza? Yes, they make our favorite sourdough pies in all of the city, including a margherita pizza with a charred bottom and tangy naturally-leavened crust, and a clam pie that will make even Connecticut pizza purists blush. Breakfast sandwiches? Of course, theirs is incredible. Between the salty, crispy, thinly-sliced guanciale, chili jam, cheddar, and aioli, every bite of this egg sandwich is as savory as it is creamy and sweet. This is all to say that we eat at Leo in Williamsburg often enough for our favorite dish to change like the weather. If you like sourdough, anchovy-dominated salads, and an effortlessly-classy dining environment where you can grab your own natural wine bottle from the fridge, you should follow our lead. Leo is open for heated outdoor dining (you can make a reservation that specifies “heaters” here), indoor service, takeout, and delivery. They also have some sweet merch, milled flour, and wine for sale in their slice shop.
Rubirosa
Reading our old reviews is like digging up a time capsule. What was I doing back in 2011 when we first wrote up Rubirosa? Apparently hanging out in Nolita a lot and using the word “hip” to describe cool things. “The Infatuation: Restaurant Reviews From Your Dad.” Even though I might not be any more “hip” these days, I do like to think that I am at least consistent. All of the things I wrote about Rubirosa in 2011 are true today. This is one of the most consistently excellent Italian restaurants in town. It happens to still be pretty “turnt up,” too. (Let’s see how well that one holds up in a few years.) The story at Rubirosa remains the same – two guys named Angelo are responsible for it, one whose family owns a legendary pizza place in Staten Island, and the other a once well-known doorman at The Beatrice Inn. They are now more famous for Rubirosa’s vodka sauce pizza than either of those two biographical facts, and for good reason. It’s one of the best pies in New York City, and you definitely need to make a trip here just to eat it.
But one of the things we love most about this restaurant is that it’s not a one trick pony. This isn’t just a pizza joint. This is a real Italian restaurant with ridiculously good food, from the antipasti to the pasta to the rainbow cookies at the end of the meal. It’s Perfect For Date Night, great for Dinner With The Parents, and there’s even an extensive gluten-free menu that they’ve had since the day they opened. As it stands today, the only difference between Rubirosa and some of New York’s most classic Italian restaurants is time. I guarantee you that when we dig up the capsule again 40 years from now, this place will still be on Mulberry Street. And I’ll probably still be writing restaurant reviews, trying to figure out what the 2044 word for “cool” is. This is why you come to Rubirosa. A perfect pie with paper thin crust, amazing vodka sauce, and fresh mozzarella. So incredibly good.
THE SPOTS
We could tell you about the way the chefs at Lucali roll out the dough with empty wine bottles in front of a wood-fired oven. We could tell you that this restaurant is BYOB, and that the little room feels like a spiritual place of pizza worship. But we’re not here to talk about those details that make Lucali an excellent place to eat. We’re here to talk about pizza. The thin-but-not-too-thin crust is the exact right balance of soft and crunchy, and the tomato sauce is the platonic ideal of tomato sauce: a little sweet, a little tangy, and good enough to eat with a spoon. Besides that, it’s just cheese and basil. If you want to add more toppings, you can, but you don’t need to.
Razza
Open for takeout, delivery, and outdoor dining “t – it’s not even in New York.” This reaction is to be expected from a lot of New Yorkers who see a Jersey City Pizza spot ranked this high. But even if Razza weren’t in the New York Metropolitan area (it is), and even if it weren’t closer to downtown Manhattan than most spots on this list (it is), the pizza here is so good that it belongs in the Top 20 for New York and New Jersey and Mars. The crust is super thin and light, but it never sags like some Neapolitan pies, and each bite is salty, sweet, and charred. We’d gladly eat it plain, but the locally-sourced toppings, like housemade cheeses and specially-bred hazelnuts, are also phenomenal. Before your next heated discussion about the best pizza in existence, take the Path train two stops to Razza. It’s a lot easier than trying to hitch a ride on one of Elon’s spaceships.
Totonno Pizzeria Napolitana
In 1924, Calvin Coolidge became president, Marlon Brando was born, and Totonno’s opened in Coney Island. And, after 90 years, they still make an extremely good pizza. This place is just one small room with a big oven in the back, and the only two menu items are small and large pies. The crust is on the thinner side, and each pizza comes covered in equal parts cheese and tomato sauce, almost like a red-and-white leopard print. Just be sure to eat your pizza quickly, because the crust won’t stay crispy forever. This is, of course, a metaphor for life, and it’s yet another thing this old-school place in Coney Island has to offer.
L&B Spumoni Gardens
A pizza and ice cream party. Every kindergartner’s favorite. Getting older means we are expected to attend more grown up celebrations (black tie weddings, baby showers, dog naming ceremonies), but at the end of the day, all anybody reeeaaallly wants is to hit up a pizza and ice cream party. And this is coming from a high-ranking member of the tribe of lactose intolerance. So, it is with great fanfare and noisemakers that we invite you to one of the city’s best pizza and ice cream parties – a meal out at L&B Spumoni Gardens. If you’ve never been, understand that the pizza and ice cream served at L&B are a bit different from what you’re used to.
First of all, let’s talk about the pizza. For all the special slices New York has to offer, you won’t often find us ranting and raving about the Sicilian. Walk into any run-of-the-mill pizzeria and chances are good that its Sicilian square pales in comparison to the standard foldable slice we New Yorkers hold so near and dear. But L&B is slanging square slices that stand up to the top triangles in town. They’re even so dedicated to the craft that they call a normal slice a “round slice.” Go ahead and walk into Joe’s sometime and order a round slice. Odds are you’ll get slapped before you get served. And unlike some of Brooklyn’s other famed pizzerias, L&B won’t make you wait three hours for your food. Pies come out of the kitchen in a normal, humane amount of time. From there, we have the ice cream, which isn’t even really ice cream, but spumoni. Spumoni is a sort of ice cream/Italian ice hybrid, with small bits of nuts and sometimes fruit mixed in. It’s lighter than Ben and Jerry’s, and a welcome change from your usual cone. Never had it? There’s no better place to make your introduction than Spumoni Gardens. Between the two of those beautiful things, the sidewalk seating here is always packed with local families on weekend afternoons and teenagers once the sun has gone down. Regardless of what time you go, or which group you happen to join, L&B will be throwing a surefire pizza and ice cream party. BYOParty hats.
New York Pizza Suprema
If you ever see someone sprinting wildly up 8th Avenue towards Penn Station – pizza box in hand, overnight bag ricocheting akimbo – know that a) they’re probably coming from Pizza Suprema, and b) these slices are worth missing a train for. The classic cheese option puts most others in the city to shame – it’s crusty, with not-too-oniony tomato sauce that bubbles up through a spongey sheet of cheese. But that’s not even the best slice here. That would be the margherita, which crunches, squishes, then oozes with basil-topped mozzarella and plum tomatoes in each and every bite. The same family has been running this pizza joint on 8th Avenue near 31st Street since 1964, tantalizing people into potentially missing their trains for a great NY slice ever since.
Bread And Salt
It would be silly to evaluate Bill Gates’ success in terms of other college dropouts. Sure, he dropped out of college, but he’s done well by the standards of Mother Teresa and Gordon Gekko. Likewise, we wouldn’t compare Tom Brady to other sixth-round draft picks. Two decades later, he’s more of a Boston hero than Paul Revere. And it would also be foolish to judge Bread And Salt only in the context of other slice shops. This Jersey City spot happens to be a counter-service pizza place, but it does so many things exceptionally well that it should be a dining destination for everyone in the New York City area.
Joe & Pat’s
The Vitruvian Man and affordable West Village apartments and a classic New York slice. These are theoretical ideals of the perfect form, rather than actual realities. There are slice shops on every street in the city striving for that mix of foldable crust, stretching mozzarella, sweet tomato sauce, and droplets of grease – but none of them achieve the optimal balance like Joe’s. The Carmine Street pizza spot makes the best slice in New York. They fold like they’ve been constructed to have a perforated edge through the middle, and the evenly-coated mozzarella and sweet tomato sauce are in ideal proportion to the crust.
Emily
Pizza is an incredibly subjective cuisine. Everyone has their favorite pie, slice, and old school Brooklyn spot firmly entrenched deep inside their psyche, and it takes a lot to mess with that hierarchy. Emily has succeeded in doing just that for us. After a couple trips to Clinton Hill, our pizza power rankings have forever changed.
We love everything about Emily. It’s the kind of restaurant you walk into and immediately know you’re in a place where good things happen. It’s a small space with tons of character. Everyone who works here is lovely, from the bartender, to the servers, to the owner, Emily, who you’ll most certainly meet. She runs the show, while her husband, Matt, cooks. The music is on point, too – Juan MacLean into Cut Copy into War On Drugs? Yes, please. And then there’s the glorious, dreamy, crispy, crunchy, heavenly thin-crusted, lightly burnt, honey-kissed yeasty goodness otherwise known as Emily’s pizza. Emily is not a classic New York pie, nor a Neapolitan. The thin crust pies are cooked in a wood-fired oven, which produces a crisped bottom underneath a thin layer of hot dough. Emily immediately enters the same category of fellow new classics like Roberta’s and Paulie Gee’s, and to be honest, is our personal favorite among the three. The pies here may be a little pricey, and not traditional at all, but holy pepperoni are they good. Of all the “new” pizzas we’ve eaten in New York, The Colony at Emily is our absolute favorite. This spicy, sweet number is a red sauce pie with homemade mozzarella, pepperoni, pickled chilis, and honey. The Emily is another mind-blower, and quite possibly the sweetest pie you’ll ever sink your teeth into. And what does Emily have the other aforementioned spots don’t? The most ridiculous burger you’ll probably eat all year AND a duck ragu pasta that’ll blow your mind. Emily: not just pizza. Oh, it’s so much more. We understand you probably have plenty of important pizza in your life already and may not want to entertain the idea of new pizza. However, you need to trust us on this one. That Emily, damn is she fine.