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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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Prince Street Pizza
Prince Street Pizza opened in 2012 in Nolita, built around Sicilian family recipes passed down through the Morano family, operating on a specific culinary philosophy the restaurant has described simply: if you can put it on pasta, you can put it on pizza. That approach shows up most clearly in the shop's signature square slice, a thick, focaccia-like Sicilian-style pie that's a genuinely different eating experience from a classic thin New York triangle. The Spicy Spring — a square slice topped with spicy soppressata that curls and crisps at the edges as it bakes — has become the specific order most people mean when they talk about Prince Street Pizza, a dish specific enough to have its own reputation somewhat separate from the restaurant as a whole, driving lines down the block on a regular basis. That square-slice format sits in genuine contrast to the classic thin New York triangle that dominates most of the rest of this list — thicker, more bread-forward, built to carry a heavier topping load without going soggy, closer in spirit to a Sicilian nonna's home cooking than a coal-oven Neapolitan tradition. For a New York pizza list, Prince Street Pizza is the essential "the square slice, done right" entry — a Sicilian family recipe turned into one of the most specifically-ordered single dishes in the city's entire pizza scene.
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