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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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Blue Moon
Blue Moon traces its family recipe back more than 50 years in its current Rockville Centre storefront, and the family itself further back still — to a first pizzeria Cosimo Montemurro opened generations earlier, a lineage the family now describes as reaching back roughly 80 years in total. Today the restaurant is run by Cosimo's grandson, Raymond Montemurro, who opened the current Blue Moon location specifically to continue his grandfather's tradition in a stylish, comfortable neighborhood setting rather than simply inheriting an existing building unchanged. The pizza itself comes out of a genuine coal-burning oven, sending out well-blistered pies loaded with classic toppings — sausage, meatballs, and the rest of a traditional Italian-American pizzeria's repertoire — cooked at the high, intense heat coal ovens are specifically valued for. That coal-fired method places Blue Moon among a small group of Long Island pizzerias still committed to the more labor-intensive, higher-maintenance coal-burning approach rather than the gas or electric ovens most competitors have long since switched to for convenience. Raymond Montemurro has described the restaurant's food as steeped in tradition "with a slight modern twist" — a framing that acknowledges Blue Moon isn't simply freezing his grandfather's original recipes in place, but updating them carefully enough to stay relevant to contemporary diners without abandoning the coal-oven technique and family recipes that define the restaurant's identity. That balance between inherited technique and gradual modernization is part of what's let Blue Moon stay a genuine multi-generational business rather than either stagnating or losing its identity to a full modern rebrand. Rockville Centre's Park Avenue corridor has real pizza competition of its own — several other well-regarded pizzerias operate within walking distance — which has kept Blue Moon's standards under constant local pressure to perform, even with five decades of history behind it. That the Montemurro family has held its position in that competitive stretch across three generations, through a coal-oven method that takes real skill and maintenance to run well, speaks to a level of consistency that newer entrants into the neighborhood have had to measure themselves against. The roughly 80-year total family lineage, running from Cosimo Montemurro's original pizzeria down through his grandson Raymond, means Blue Moon's current owner grew up around the coal-oven technique rather than learning it as an adopted trade — a meaningfully different foundation than a chef-owner who trained elsewhere and later decided to open a pizzeria of his own. For a Long Island pizza list, Blue Moon is the essential "three generations, one coal oven" entry — a Rockville Centre pizzeria tracing back roughly 80 years through the Montemurro family, still baking classic, well-blistered pies in a genuine coal-burning oven under the grandson of the family's founding pizzaiolo.
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