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Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana
Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana opened in 1925 in New Haven, Connecticut, founded by Italian immigrant Frank Pepe, and it's widely credited alongside a small handful of other New Haven pizzerias with developing "apizza," the city's distinct coal-fired, char-blistered pizza style that developed as its own regional tradition largely independent of New York's more widely known slice culture just 90 miles away. The restaurant's signature white clam pizza, topped with fresh clams, garlic, oregano, and grated cheese but no tomato sauce, has become one of the most specifically celebrated individual pizza dishes in the entire country, frequently cited on national "best pizza" rankings as a genuinely singular dish unlike almost anything else in American pizza. Pepe's coal-fired brick ovens, a technology the restaurant has maintained since its founding, produce a distinctively charred, blistered crust that's become the defining textural signature of the New Haven apizza style more broadly, a cooking method that requires genuine technical skill to manage consistently at the high, uneven heat coal ovens produce. Frank Pepe's combination of nearly a century of continuous operation, its foundational role in developing New Haven's distinct apizza tradition, and its nationally celebrated white clam pie has made it one of the most historically significant pizzerias anywhere in the country, genuinely distinct from the more widely known New York and Chicago styles.
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Di Fara Pizza
Di Fara Pizza opened in 1965 in Midwood, Brooklyn, founded by Domenico "Dom" DeMarco, who had emigrated from the Province of Caserta, Italy, in 1959. DeMarco found the Avenue J storefront almost by accident — visiting on a recommendation, he found the corner bustling with foot traffic on a Saturday night and signed the lease on the spot. The name itself is a small tribute to that beginning: "Di" for DeMarco, "Fara" for his original partner Farina, a name DeMarco kept even after buying out that partnership in 1978. For decades, DeMarco made every single pizza himself, standing at the same spot behind the counter, hand-cutting basil with scissors directly onto each pie and finishing it with a specific, unhurried ritual that became as much a part of the restaurant's identity as the pizza itself — a level of personal, hands-on involvement that became genuinely rare as the restaurant's fame grew and wait times stretched into hours. That fame built slowly over decades rather than through any single viral moment, driven almost entirely by word of mouth among people willing to travel to a fairly out-of-the-way Midwood storefront and wait a genuinely long time for a pie made one at a time by one specific person. DeMarco passed away in 2022, and the restaurant has continued under his family since, carrying forward a recipe and process that spent nearly sixty years being made almost exclusively by its founder's own hands. For a New York pizza list, Di Fara is the essential "one man, one recipe, six decades" entry — proof that a genuinely great New York slice doesn't need a second location to matter.
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