New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
It's Apizza
The taste of the tomato pie baked into New Haven history and future
NEW HAVEN — Locals know what the world is catching on to: New Haven does great pizza.
“New Haven is the up and coming underdog of big pizza cities,” said New Haven historian Colin Caplan, who has written the first pizza history book on the subject. “Everyone knows New York, Chicago, Naples, Rome. They look at these cites and say these are probably big pizza cities. They look at New Haven and say, ‘Really? It’s known for pizza?’ These are not people we’re worried about. People who know pizza know New Haven.”
New Haven’s reputation for pizza is comparable to Philadelphia’s for the cheesesteak, Miami’s for the Cubano sandwich and Texas for barbecue in general, he said. All these cites that are known for these different foods came with immigrants. Here, they were Italians.
“I think New Haven was known before pizza was ever popular that this was a place you could get good pizza,” he said. “As the world increased in its pizza consumption, and people were doing all kinds of
crazy things with pizza and people could find any kind of pizza anywhere, people were able to say, ‘New Haven has better pizza than where I come from.’”
Those who visit the city often come for the pizza, hailing from Pennsylvania, Ohio, London and elsewhere, he said. News articles from the 1950s have even touted New Haven as a pizza destination. The signature Neapolitan pie known as “apizza” (pronounced ah-BEETS) has put the city on the food map of the world by adhering to tradition and simplicity.
“There’s this awe and wonder of how this pizza is so good,” Caplan said. “How did New Haven do this in such a great way?” Apizza’s origins can be traced to nearly 100 years ago on Wooster Street.
The original masters
Two restaurants are credited with establishing New Haven as a pizza city: Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana and Sally’s Apizza, each started by an Italian immigrant. Their stories are known in some form by the thousands of people who have eaten a slice of New Haven history.
Frank Pepe, born in Maiori on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, immigrated at 16 to the U.S. in 1909, getting his first job in a New Haven factory. He returned to Italy to fight in WWI, but came back to New Haven in 1920, newly wed to Filomena Volpi. Pepe worked at a macaroni factory on Wooster Street before opening his own bakery on the same street in New Haven’s “Little Italy” neighborhood. He baked his bread and delivered it to the community with a cart, but since Pepe was illiterate, he couldn’t keep track of the orders, so he opened a store where customers would come to him.
He and his wife began making a simple recipe from their country — pizza, known to them as “apizza” in their Neapolitan dialect. They started baking their signature pizza in 1925 with tomatoes, grated cheese, garlic, oregano and olive oil, offering a second type with anchovy.
“When he opened it was just takeout, but it grew rapidly and expanded business inside with sit-down tables,” Pepe’s grandson Gary Bimonte said. “He was one of the first to offer the sitdown restaurant.”
Pepe’s was and has remained a family business. In his restaurant is where Pepe’s nephew Salvatore “Sal” Consiglio learned pizza-making. When Pepe moved his pizzeria to its current location in 1937, Consiglio struck out on his own, opening Sally’s Apizza down the street in 1938. They, too, served a traditional tomato pie. Until 2018, Sally’s was one of the oldest familyoperated pizza restaurants in the Northeast.
Over the years many notable people came to enjoy what already was becoming a widespread fact: New Haven had great pizza. Pepe’s served apizzas to former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, along with Tony Bennett, Bill Murray, Gene Siskel, Meryl Streep and Danny DeVito.
Sally’s can count Bill and Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, former Gov. Lowell Weicker, Glenn Miller, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, Jodi Foster, Michael Bolton and Frank Sinatra among its patrons. The story goes that Sinatra played a show in New Haven in 1940 with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and the Consiglios served the band pizza and beer until closing at 3 a.m. Sinatra became a family friend and had Sally’s pizza delivered to New York for his big shows, Caplan said.
Bimonte and his relatives run the 10 Pepe’s locations in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York, serving on average one million pizzas a year across them all, Bimonte said. But the recipe is still the same.
“We still adhere to our grandfathers’ recipe, serving the finest ingredients and products imported from Italy,” he said “We’re not changing a thing.” Similarly, Sally’s, which was sold to Lineage Hospitality last year, has kept the recipe the same with Consiglio’s sons, Bob and Rick Consiglio maintaining the family tradition of pizza-making at the restaurant.
Around the time Pepe had established himself and Consiglio opened his joint, more places started popping up around the city. Enter Modern Apizza.
Antonio “Tony” Tolli, an Italian immigrant, opened Tony’s Apizza at 874 State St. in 1936. A year later, 14-year-old Nick Nuzzo started working in the restaurant, which he would later manage and own after Tolli opened another restaurant in East Haven — today’s Tolli’s Apizza. Louis Persano, who had worked for Pepe, took over Tolli’s lease in 1944, but opted out of the pizza business after some years. With Nuzzo still working there, in 1952 he bought what was renamed Modern and brought his brother Fred to work in the restaurant, who later opened Grand Apizza in 1955 in Fair Haven.
Nuzzo ran the place with his son and William “Billy Butts” Cretella until Nuzzo’s retirement in the late ’80s. He sold Modern to William “Billy” Pustari, who has grown the restaurant to what it is today. Since then it has topped many “best” lists, including Connecticut Magazine’s Best of Connecticut list this year for pizza restaurants. Cretella still works some nights at Modern, making him the oldest pizza maker in the city. Even with the changes in owners, Modern is just as people remember it, Caplan said.
“Sally’s Pepe’s or Modern, if you’ve never had one of those, you’ve never had pizza,” he said.
New kid on the block
It’s hard to rise to the level of having masterful pizza these days because the standards for New Haven-style pizza are so high, Caplan said. But Bar has made its way into the city’s reputation for great pizza.
“As one of the newer kids on the block, it’s established itself on the level of those other pizzerias because of the quality of the pizza, the experience and the specialty pizza,” Caplan said.
“It’s nice to be mentioned in the same sentence as these pizza places that are 100 years old,” general manager Frank Patrick said. “Those places were always known for making New Haven famous for great pizza.”
Bar was started in the early ’90s by Randy Hoder, Kenny Spitzbard and Stuart Press as a bar and dance club. A few years into it they decided to expand, offer some food “and what better than pizza, because New Haven was already famous for pizza,” Patrick said. They decided to do a traditional thin crust and the customers have been crowding the restaurant ever since.
“On Saturday we can make over 800 pies,” Patrick said. When they open for lunch on the weekend they stay packed all the way through. Thier most popular pizza is the mashed potoato bacon, which wasn’t meant to be a signature pie, but soon became everyone’s favorite and what Bar is known for.
“You have to come down and try it to understand,” he said. Bar isn’t trying to compete with anybody, though, they’re just making the best product they can, he said.
“In some cities you can have all these different restaurants with different kinds of food doing crazy things, but here it’s extremely hard to have a new pizzeria that’s going to match the old style,” Caplan said.
A slice of life
Pizza has been listed time and again as many people’s favorite food and through its ever-growing popularity and culture has developed around the simple food. Yale University students likely were some of the first college students to ever have pizza at their fingertips and, after the repeal of Prohibition, pizza restaurants became a social scene. Bakeries converted to pizzerias and non-Italians began enjoying the food.
It started in the ’30s as a social experience. People had meager amounts of money and pizza was cheap. A night out was on Friday or Saturday, with a group going to a pizzeria, sharing a pie for $0.25 then going to the movies. Some people would go to the pizzeria after because they were open late until 3 a.m., Caplan said. If people wanted to hang out late, they’d go to a pizzeria, play pinball and put music on the jukebox.
“After the big pizza boom in the ’50s and ’60s, I don’t think New Haven got recognized in a national sense until the ’70s,” Caplan said. “That’s when the lines start forming at Sally’s and Pepe’s.”
It’s when redevelopment in New Haven brought changes.
“The thing that settled after the dust was that really good pizza was still there,” he said. “I think that’s a testament to the Italian community . ... It’s the fact it hasn’t changed and the recipes have been kept the same. It has to do with the families who ran it and the people who supported it. There was a demand for that quality of pizza and if you did change it, you wouldn’t last in business. People wouldn’t support you anymore.”
Everyone’s favorite
As old as pizza-making itself is the debate of whose is the best. But the answer will depend on who’s judging.
“It’s always been this thing in New Haven, who has the best pizza,” Patrick said.
Pizza-eaters perceived a competition between Pepe’s and Sally’s when it opened, but Bimonte said between the families there was never animosity. The only rivalry was friendly and that’s how it remains among all the pizza-making establishments, he said. But it’s a “rivalry” embedded in the city’s history.
“Sally’s has their customers, Modern has theirs and Bar has theirs. To each their own,” Bimonte said. Each establishment has reached many “best” lists over the years and amassed their own number of dedicated customers, each insisting “their place” is the best.
It’s an identifiable thing,” Caplan said. “Picking your favorite pizzeria and sticking with it is like picking a sports team. It’s as serious as that. You’re really a fan and you’re going to love them no matter who well they do. If you think it’s the best, it’s always going to be the best.”
If you ask Caplan who has the best pizza, he’ll say his hometown.
“I think New Haven pizza is the best pizza in the world,” he said. “I’ve been to Naples, Amalfi, Rome, New York City. I’m still going to more places that people tell me about but I can say with an education that New Haven’s pizza is totally different than what they serve in Italy, and it’s so much better. Everything else in Italy is better except for the pizza.”
Erica Lynn Pustari said when customers come through Modern’s doors, they tell her the same thing — the pizza in New Haven is better than anywhere else.
“It’s always the same thing,” she said, people coming from all over for the reputation of the pizza.
Always a pizza city
These places have seen generations of families come loyally through their doors. Bimonte said he’s seen people grow up eating Pepe’s pizza and the “oldtimers” saying the family is keeping the traditional taste. Sally’s and Modern have experienced the same phenomenon.
“It’s a tradition that passes on,” Pustari said. “Not everyone gets into Yale, but everyone eats pizza,” she said.
“No one who started these businesses ever imagined these businesses would last more than 20 years,” he said. “The fact we have 80- to 90-year-old pizzerias in the area is amazing.” Bimonte said it’s a blessing.
One can’t count how many pizza restaurants exist in New Haven, as Caplan has tried, but he approximates the city probably claims around 200 within its limits and around 500 in the surrounding area.
While Pepe’s, Sally’s and Modern remain the most famous of Greater New Haven’s familyowned pizza joints, they aren’t the only ones with history and reputation. Among others are Grand Apizza, Dayton Street Apizza and Ernie’s Pizzeria in New Haven; Zuppardi’s Apizza, Mikes Apizza and Michaelangelo’s Pizza in West Haven; Tolli’s Apizza and DePalma’s Apizza in East Haven; and Roseland Apizza in Derby.
“New Haven will always be known for pizza and it’s going to get more and more known because pizza is becoming more popular these days,” Caplan said.