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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.
VS
Amore Pizzeria
Richard Graffeo, a Brooklyn native, spent years working at four separate pizza places alongside his uncle across Long Island before deciding it was time to put down roots of his own. He bought a storefront in Bay Shore on December 13, 1991, and exactly one month later, on January 13, 1992, opened it as Amore Pizzeria — a name chosen as a direct nod to his uncle's own restaurants, which had operated under the name "Pizzeria Amore." The recipe Graffeo brought to Union Boulevard has stayed essentially unchanged since that January 1992 opening — a genuinely rare claim for a pizzeria to make honestly after more than three decades in business, where recipe drift, cost-cutting substitutions, and ownership changes tend to erode even well-loved originals over time. Graffeo opened Amore with his wife and two young sons at his side, and the restaurant has stayed a family operation through the decades since, which is a meaningful part of why the recipe has held steady rather than been quietly adjusted for margin. Local coverage has tracked that consistency at genuine milestones rather than treating it as a one-time story — Greater Long Island profiled the restaurant's 25th anniversary in Bay Shore, and Patch later covered its 31st year in business under the headline "Everything We Had," a phrase that captures how directly Graffeo has described his own investment in the restaurant since buying that storefront in 1991. Few Long Island pizzerias get two separate rounds of anniversary press coverage from local outlets years apart, and fewer still earn it for staying essentially the same restaurant throughout. That the pizza recipe traces to Graffeo's own apprenticeship years working alongside his uncle, rather than to formal culinary training or a franchise system, gives Amore a direct, single-family lineage that's stayed intact since before the restaurant even had its own address — Graffeo learned the technique at his uncle's pizzerias first, and only opened his own place once he'd fully internalized it, rather than improvising a recipe from scratch on day one. The exact one-month gap between buying the storefront in December 1991 and opening in January 1992 suggests a founder who moved decisively once he'd made the decision to go out on his own, after years of working at someone else's restaurants first — a pattern of patient apprenticeship followed by a fast, committed launch that's held up as the defining shape of Graffeo's whole career in the business. For a Long Island pizza list, Amore Pizzeria is the essential "unchanged recipe, three-plus decades running" entry — a Bay Shore pizzeria Richard Graffeo opened in January 1992 with a recipe learned directly from his uncle's own pizzerias, still run by the same family and still, by the restaurant's own account, unchanged since it opened.
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