The Best Pizza In New York City : You Can't Miss!

New York City pizza is redundant. The phrase, that is. That inimitable confluence of flour, local tap water, tomato sauce, and cheese -- it all started here. The now-touristy Lombardi’s was licensed in 1905, making it the first pizza shop in the United States. Lombardi’s alumni went on to open some of the city’s other legendary pizza shops -- Totonno’s in Coney Island, John’s in the West Village, Patsy’s Pizzeria in East Harlem -- New York City pizza is, simply, pizza.
As listicles, outcry over our mayor’s pizza-eating method, and any New York transplant in LA, Detroit, or Chicago will tell you, we’re tethered to our pizza identity. Jon Stewart once spent a whole segment on The Daily Show arguing that Chicago deep-dish pizza is not only worse than NYC pizza, it can’t even be classified as pizza.
But pizza in New York isn’t what it used to be. Today, it would be hard for a visitor even to identify an archetypal slice - we’ve got so much variety. New Yorkers love late-night slices as much as Neapolitans, Sicilians, and even St. Louis and Detroit-style pies. For the best of the ever-changing pizza landscape in NYC (plus some old reliables), consult our time-tested, ever-updated pizza bible.