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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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Juliana's
Juliana's opened in December 2012 in DUMBO, Brooklyn, founded by Patsy Grimaldi, who came out of retirement at age 80 to open it — a genuinely unusual restaurant-industry comeback, in the exact building he'd previously run as the original Grimaldi's Pizzeria before selling that brand name and its franchise rights in 1998. Grimaldi named the new restaurant Juliana's after his mother, Maria "Juliana" Lancieri Grimaldi, a personal tribute built into the business's identity from day one. The opening itself was delayed by legal disputes with the Grimaldi's brand he'd sold years earlier, pushing what was originally planned as a March 2012 debut back to that December — a reminder that even a beloved, retired pizzaiolo returning to his own old kitchen wasn't a simple, uncomplicated homecoming. That legal tangle aside, Juliana's gave Grimaldi a chance to return to the same coal-fired oven and DUMBO storefront where he'd already built one legendary pizza reputation, effectively competing directly with the brand carrying his own former name a few doors down — a genuinely strange dynamic that's become part of the neighborhood's pizza lore, with regulars debating which of the two is actually closer to the "real" Grimaldi's pizza. For a New York pizza list, Juliana's is the essential "the founder's actual comeback" entry — an 80-year-old pizzaiolo returning to his own original kitchen to make the case, in person, that he never needed the name he'd sold to make the pizza that made it famous.
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