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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.
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Salvatore's Coal Oven Pizzeria
Salvatore's Coal Oven Pizzeria traces its roots to 1933, when Pat and Carmella Lancieri opened the legendary Patsy's Pizzeria on First Avenue in Harlem — one of the small handful of restaurants credited with establishing New York's original coal-oven pizza tradition. More than sixty years later, in 1996, the Lancieris' great-nephews, Fred and Marco, brought that same technique to Long Island, opening what's documented as the Island's first-ever coal-fired, brick-oven pizzeria on Shore Road in Port Washington, and naming the restaurant Salvatore's after their father. The coal-fired brick oven is the whole reason the pizzeria exists in this specific form. Coal burns significantly hotter than a standard gas or electric pizza oven, giving the crust a distinctive char and a crisp-yet-chewy structure that's difficult to replicate with other cooking methods — the same technical foundation that made Patsy's a foundational name in New York coal-oven pizza nearly a century ago. That Fred and Marco chose to import that specific technique to Long Island in 1996, rather than a more generic wood-fired or standard gas-oven approach already common in the region, reflects a direct, deliberate continuation of their family's original method rather than a loosely inspired homage. Being first matters here in a very literal sense: introducing coal-oven pizza to Long Island in 1996 meant Salvatore's had no local template to follow and no local competition executing the same technique, giving the restaurant nearly three decades to refine its specific approach to coal-fired baking largely on its own terms. Later Long Island coal-oven pizzerias that have opened in the years since have effectively been following a path Salvatore's cut first. The restaurant has stayed in the same Port Washington location for essentially its entire history, building a reputation as a foundational name in Long Island's own pizza landscape rather than remaining a footnote to its more famous Harlem lineage — regulars know Salvatore's for its own decades of consistency on Shore Road, not simply as "the Patsy's family's Long Island outpost." That's a meaningful distinction for a restaurant whose founding story is so closely tied to a more famous predecessor. For a Long Island pizza list, Salvatore's Coal Oven Pizzeria is the essential "the Island's first coal oven" entry — a Port Washington pizzeria built by the great-nephews of Patsy's Pizzeria's own founders, bringing a nearly century-old Harlem coal-oven tradition to Long Island in 1996 and refining it there for almost three decades since.
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