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Blue Moon
Blue Moon traces its family recipe back more than 50 years in its current Rockville Centre storefront, and the family itself further back still — to a first pizzeria Cosimo Montemurro opened generations earlier, a lineage the family now describes as reaching back roughly 80 years in total. Today the restaurant is run by Cosimo's grandson, Raymond Montemurro, who opened the current Blue Moon location specifically to continue his grandfather's tradition in a stylish, comfortable neighborhood setting rather than simply inheriting an existing building unchanged. The pizza itself comes out of a genuine coal-burning oven, sending out well-blistered pies loaded with classic toppings — sausage, meatballs, and the rest of a traditional Italian-American pizzeria's repertoire — cooked at the high, intense heat coal ovens are specifically valued for. That coal-fired method places Blue Moon among a small group of Long Island pizzerias still committed to the more labor-intensive, higher-maintenance coal-burning approach rather than the gas or electric ovens most competitors have long since switched to for convenience. Raymond Montemurro has described the restaurant's food as steeped in tradition "with a slight modern twist" — a framing that acknowledges Blue Moon isn't simply freezing his grandfather's original recipes in place, but updating them carefully enough to stay relevant to contemporary diners without abandoning the coal-oven technique and family recipes that define the restaurant's identity. That balance between inherited technique and gradual modernization is part of what's let Blue Moon stay a genuine multi-generational business rather than either stagnating or losing its identity to a full modern rebrand. Rockville Centre's Park Avenue corridor has real pizza competition of its own — several other well-regarded pizzerias operate within walking distance — which has kept Blue Moon's standards under constant local pressure to perform, even with five decades of history behind it. That the Montemurro family has held its position in that competitive stretch across three generations, through a coal-oven method that takes real skill and maintenance to run well, speaks to a level of consistency that newer entrants into the neighborhood have had to measure themselves against. The roughly 80-year total family lineage, running from Cosimo Montemurro's original pizzeria down through his grandson Raymond, means Blue Moon's current owner grew up around the coal-oven technique rather than learning it as an adopted trade — a meaningfully different foundation than a chef-owner who trained elsewhere and later decided to open a pizzeria of his own. For a Long Island pizza list, Blue Moon is the essential "three generations, one coal oven" entry — a Rockville Centre pizzeria tracing back roughly 80 years through the Montemurro family, still baking classic, well-blistered pies in a genuine coal-burning oven under the grandson of the family's founding pizzaiolo.
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Umberto's of New Hyde Park
Umberto Corteo was born in the village of Monte di Procida, near Naples, into a family of thirteen children who worked their father's farm to help feed the household. After immigrating to America as a teenager and working restaurant kitchens in Brooklyn to save capital, Umberto and his younger brother Joe pooled their earnings and opened the original Umberto's of New Hyde Park in 1965 — the pizzeria that's since grown into a two-story Tuscan-style restaurant with a full-service café, formal dining room, and banquet facilities drawing tens of thousands of guests a year. The restaurant's most significant contribution to New York food history has nothing to do with its dining room, however — it's the origin of grandma pizza. According to food historian Barry Popik's documented account, Umberto would ask his brother Carlo, who joined the business in 1970, to make him "that pizza that Mama used to make" back in Italy — a home-style, thin, rectangular pan pizza that Umberto initially resisted putting on the actual menu even as friends who tried it urged him to. That off-menu family pizza eventually made its way, through the extended Corteo family network, to a satellite location the family had opened in Elmont; after that location was sold in 1976, two pizza makers hired by its new owners recognized the dish's potential and began serving it under the name a regular customer suggested — "grandma," because it reminded him more of a grandmother's cooking than a restaurant pizza. The dish then spread across Long Island, Queens, and Brooklyn from that shared origin point, with Umberto's New Hyde Park location remaining the place most identified with where the family recipe began. That disputed, multi-generational origin story — Umberto's the birthplace of the actual recipe, a related family restaurant the place where it first got a name and a menu listing — is itself part of what makes the pizza's history worth knowing rather than a simple, tidy founding myth. The restaurant has since expanded to five Long Island locations while keeping the original New Hyde Park address as its flagship, still serving the same square, thin-crusted pie that eventually gave an entire category of American pizza its name. For a Long Island pizza list, Umberto's of New Hyde Park is the essential "birthplace of grandma pizza" entry — a 1965 Corteo family pizzeria whose off-menu, mother's-recipe pan pizza became, through a genuinely tangled family history, the origin point of one of New York's most widely imitated pizza styles.
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