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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.
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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