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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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Umberto's of New Hyde Park
Umberto Corteo was born in the village of Monte di Procida, near Naples, into a family of thirteen children who worked their father's farm to help feed the household. After immigrating to America as a teenager and working restaurant kitchens in Brooklyn to save capital, Umberto and his younger brother Joe pooled their earnings and opened the original Umberto's of New Hyde Park in 1965 — the pizzeria that's since grown into a two-story Tuscan-style restaurant with a full-service café, formal dining room, and banquet facilities drawing tens of thousands of guests a year. The restaurant's most significant contribution to New York food history has nothing to do with its dining room, however — it's the origin of grandma pizza. According to food historian Barry Popik's documented account, Umberto would ask his brother Carlo, who joined the business in 1970, to make him "that pizza that Mama used to make" back in Italy — a home-style, thin, rectangular pan pizza that Umberto initially resisted putting on the actual menu even as friends who tried it urged him to. That off-menu family pizza eventually made its way, through the extended Corteo family network, to a satellite location the family had opened in Elmont; after that location was sold in 1976, two pizza makers hired by its new owners recognized the dish's potential and began serving it under the name a regular customer suggested — "grandma," because it reminded him more of a grandmother's cooking than a restaurant pizza. The dish then spread across Long Island, Queens, and Brooklyn from that shared origin point, with Umberto's New Hyde Park location remaining the place most identified with where the family recipe began. That disputed, multi-generational origin story — Umberto's the birthplace of the actual recipe, a related family restaurant the place where it first got a name and a menu listing — is itself part of what makes the pizza's history worth knowing rather than a simple, tidy founding myth. The restaurant has since expanded to five Long Island locations while keeping the original New Hyde Park address as its flagship, still serving the same square, thin-crusted pie that eventually gave an entire category of American pizza its name. For a Long Island pizza list, Umberto's of New Hyde Park is the essential "birthplace of grandma pizza" entry — a 1965 Corteo family pizzeria whose off-menu, mother's-recipe pan pizza became, through a genuinely tangled family history, the origin point of one of New York's most widely imitated pizza styles.
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About King Umberto
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