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Delancey
Delancey opened in 2009 in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, founded by chef Brandon Pettit and co-owner Molly Wizenberg — former spouses who built the restaurant together and have continued running it jointly since. Wizenberg's popular food blog played a direct role in the restaurant's creation and early following, giving Delancey a built-in audience of readers curious to taste what she'd been writing about long before most Seattle diners had heard of the place. The restaurant is a genuine wood-fired pizzeria specializing in a Brooklyn-style pie — tomato sauce, mozzarella, and grana as the base, built up with toppings like bacon, basil, mushrooms, fennel pork sausage, and Kalamata olives. That Brooklyn-leaning style sets Delancey apart from both the Neapolitan-certified pizzerias and the deep-dish transplants elsewhere on this list, occupying its own distinct lane within Seattle's pizza scene. Delancey's reputation has traveled well beyond Ballard: the restaurant has picked up acclaim from Bon Appétit, The New York Times, and USA Today, a level of national food-press attention that's genuinely rare for a single-location neighborhood pizzeria without any expansion plans of its own. In 2011, the Pettit-Wizenberg team added a pantry space next door, extending Delancey's offerings and giving the concept room to grow slightly without diluting the original pizzeria's identity or seating. That restraint — expanding sideways into a complementary concept rather than opening additional pizzeria locations — has helped keep Delancey feeling like a genuinely personal restaurant rather than a scaling brand, even fifteen-plus years after its blog-fueled opening. For a Seattle pizza list, Delancey is the essential "the pizzeria a food blog built" entry — a Brooklyn-style, wood-fired Ballard original from a husband-and-wife team, still earning national press more than fifteen years after opening on the strength of Wizenberg's original readership and Pettit's pizza.
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Pagliacci Pizza
Pagliacci Pizza opened on February 19, 1979, at 4529 University Way in Seattle's University District, founded by Matt Galvin and Pat McDonald. That original location ran continuously — through countless remodels and face-lifts — until it finally closed in July 2018 after a 39-year run, a genuinely long life for a single storefront in a neighborhood that's changed dramatically around it. The pizza itself sticks to a straightforward, well-executed thin-crust format, sold through multiple channels at once: delivery, sit-down dining rooms, and pizza-by-the-slice counters, giving Pagliacci more flexibility than a typical single-format pizzeria. That range has let it become one of the most reliably present pizza names across the entire city rather than a single-neighborhood favorite. One of the more distinctive details across Pagliacci's dining rooms is decor built around vintage Italian-language movie posters — a small, consistent design touch that gives even the newest locations a sense of connection back to the original University Way storefront's era, even though most current customers have never set foot in that closed original. The chain has grown into one of the largest pizza operations in the region, with 24 locations spanning King and Snohomish counties, and it's kept pushing on operational firsts along the way — in 2012, Pagliacci opened Seattle's first stand-alone LEED-certified pizzeria in the Madison Park neighborhood, a genuinely early sustainability commitment for a regional pizza chain of its size and age. For a Seattle pizza list, Pagliacci is the essential "the name that's just everywhere, for good reason" entry — a 1979 University District original that's grown into a 24-location regional chain without losing the consistent, well-executed thin-crust pizza that built its original reputation.
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