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King Umberto
King Umberto opened in Elmont in 1976 on the corner of Meacham Avenue and Hempstead Turnpike — a small, cramped operation with the bar squeezed directly between the pizzeria and the dining room — before the restaurant expanded into a larger space in February 1987 that could properly accommodate its growing base of regulars. The restaurant carries the "Umberto's" name through the same extended Corteo family network responsible for the original Umberto's of New Hyde Park, though King Umberto has built its own, distinct identity and history since. That history includes a genuinely central role in one of New York pizza's more contested origin stories. After King Umberto's ownership changed hands to brothers Rosario and Sal Fuschetto, they hired two pizza makers in the 1980s, Ciro Cesarano and Angelo Giangrande, who recognized the commercial potential in a thin, rectangular, home-style pan pizza and put it on King Umberto's menu — the same style of pizza the Corteo family had been making informally at their New Hyde Park location. A regular customer, Anthony "Tippy" Nocella, suggested the pizza reminded him of something a grandmother would make rather than a restaurant, and the name stuck. In 1989, Nocella accompanied Giangrande and Fuschetto to a Delicato Foods pizza competition in Farmingdale, where, in Giangrande's own account, "my pizza was gone before the competition even started" — the moment that pushed grandma pizza into wider Long Island recognition. Ciro Cesarano's son, Giovanni Cesarano, now runs King Umberto as managing partner, having started making pizza there at 16 years old when a scheduled pizza maker didn't show up for a busy holiday shift — a start that turned into a two-decade career at the same restaurant. Giovanni has pushed King Umberto's pizza program well beyond its grandma-pizza roots, winning first place in the 2018 Caputo Cup for an award-winning gluten-free Sicilian-style pizza and second place in the 2019 Caputo Cup for a high-hydration, three-day-fermented Roman-style pizza — genuinely competitive, technically demanding styles that put King Umberto in direct conversation with serious pizza makers nationally, not just other Long Island shops. That combination — a genuine claim to the invention of an entire pizza category, plus a second-generation owner actively winning national competitions in completely different styles decades later — gives King Umberto a rare dual identity as both a historical landmark and a currently competitive kitchen. For a Long Island pizza list, King Umberto is the essential "where grandma pizza actually got its name" entry — an Elmont pizzeria run by the son of the pizza maker credited with the naming, now also a Caputo Cup award winner pushing Roman- and Sicilian-style pizza well past its own grandma-pizza legacy.
VS
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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