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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.
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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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