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Joe's Pizza
Joe's Pizza opened in 1975 in Greenwich Village, founded by Pino "Joe" Pozzuoli, an Italian immigrant from Naples, built around exactly the kind of no-frills, classic New York slice format that's become harder to find well-executed as the city's pizza scene has diversified into wood-fired Neapolitan spots and Sicilian squares. The restaurant briefly closed in 2005 before reopening, a genuine scare for a shop that had, by that point, already spent three decades building a reputation as one of the most reliable classic slices in Manhattan. New York Times critic Pete Wells later described Joe's as one of the reference points other "neoclassical slice-shop owners" specifically cite when they talk about emulating old-school New York pizza — a direct acknowledgment from a serious food critic that Joe's isn't just old, it's the standard newer places are trying to live up to. That reputation has held up specifically because Joe's hasn't chased trends — no elaborate topping combinations, no wood-fired Neapolitan pivot, just a well-executed, foldable New York slice sold fast out of a small Carmine Street storefront, the same basic format the shop opened with in 1975. For a New York pizza list, Joe's Pizza is the essential "the standard other places measure themselves against" entry — a fifty-year-old Greenwich Village slice shop that professional critics point to specifically when they want to describe what a serious classic New York slice is supposed to taste like.
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Lombardi's
"America's first pizzeria," is how Lombardi's has been recognized by the Pizza Hall of Fame, tracing back to 1905 in what's now Nolita, credited traditionally to Italian immigrant Gennaro Lombardi. It's a title that's genuinely contested — a 2019 investigation found that Lombardi arrived in America only in late 1904, listed as a laborer rather than an owner, and more recent research points to Filippo Milone as the pizzeria's actual founder, with Lombardi possibly an employee who later took over the business. Whatever the exact founding credit, the original location closed in 1984, and the Lombardi name went dormant until 1994, when Gennaro Lombardi III and John Brescio reopened it at 32 Spring Street, close to the original site, reviving the coal-fired oven technique and classic New York-style pie that had built the name's reputation in the first place. The restaurant has leaned into its own contested history rather than smoothing it over, running anniversary promotions in 2005 and 2015 that sold pizzas at the original 1905 price of five cents — a nod to the founding date the whole business is named around, even as historians keep complicating exactly whose founding it actually was. That tangled origin story is arguably part of what makes Lombardi's worth visiting rather than a distraction from it: whether or not Gennaro Lombardi personally invented American pizza, this Nolita coal-oven pie is where the city's now-dominant food identity is conventionally said to have started, disputed footnotes and all.
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