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Casa Bianca Pizza Pie
Sam Martorana had a real pizza pedigree by the time he relocated to Los Angeles from Chicago in the mid-1950s — his father ran a grocery business, and Sam himself had worked a stint at Tony's Pizza back home. He and his wife Jennie, along with Sam's brother Joe, opened Casa Bianca in January 1955, shortly after arriving with three young children in tow, and built the restaurant's entire identity around scratch-made, family-recipe pizza rather than any single gimmick. The sausage pizza is the dish most closely identified with the restaurant: sweetly spiced homemade sausage studded with roasted garlic, piled generously with mozzarella over a crust that's been described as chewy yet crisp, thin but substantial enough to carry real developed wheat flavor rather than just functioning as a base for toppings. The restaurant has stayed a genuine family operation for seven decades — Sam and Jennie's son Ned and daughter Andrea joined the business as it grew, and even in the restaurant's later years, Jennie remained involved in kitchen supervision while Sam personally oversaw the sausage production that gives the signature pizza its specific flavor. Seventy years in the same Eagle Rock storefront, run continuously by the same family, with the same made-from-scratch sausage recipe Sam brought west from Chicago in the 1950s, is a rare thing for any Los Angeles restaurant to sustain — long lines and a no-frills dining room have stayed part of the experience the entire time, treated as a feature rather than something to modernize away. Sam still oversees the sausage; that isn't nostalgia marketing, it's simply how the kitchen has always run.
VS
Masa of Echo Park
Masa of Echo Park was established in 2004 specifically to bring authentic Chicago deep-dish pizza to Los Angeles — a proper, buttery, tall-edged crust and thick, cheese-and-sauce-heavy build that defines the style back in its home city, made with organic and locally sourced ingredients where possible alongside imported Chicago specialties. In a city with no shortage of thin-crust and Neapolitan-leaning pizzerias, Masa has carved out a specific niche as one of the only places locals point to for a genuine deep-dish fix. The build follows deep-dish convention closely — a thick, pan-baked crust with high, buttery edges, a generous layer of cheese, and chunky tomato sauce spooned over the top rather than underneath, the reverse-layering that separates true deep-dish from a merely thick pizza. It's a substantial, knife-and-fork order rather than a quick handheld slice, and portions are built accordingly. The restaurant has become an Echo Park fixture specifically because it commits fully to the format rather than offering deep-dish as one style among several — a bakery-and-pizzeria combination that treats the Chicago-style pie as its core identity rather than a novelty item on a broader thin-crust menu. That single-minded focus is part of what's kept Masa relevant for Angelenos specifically craving deep-dish rather than just good pizza generally — there's a real difference between a restaurant offering a deep-dish option and one built entirely around getting the style right, and Masa has stayed firmly in the second category through years of operation in the same Echo Park neighborhood. Order a slice here and you'll need a fork — that alone separates it from everything else on this list.
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About Casa Bianca Pizza Pie
About Masa of Echo Park
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