What Is the Name of the First Pizzeria to Open in the United States?

26 Jun The Real History Of Pizza In America

Posted at 17:52h in Pizza History

You lot can't say you honey pizza, I mean really love pizza without knowing some pizza history! I've had the special occasion to talk "shop" with Bill Rice, the possessor of TJ's, on numerous occasions. Inevitably our chat turns to not just pizza, simply famous pizza. Both of us existence from the Northeast, nosotros have a special fondness for good pizza and good stories.

Recently, Bill and I were speaking nigh the all-time pizza we ever had and the name Pepe's came up, that famous spot in New Haven, CT…and that was the inspiration for this story! We wanted to trace the history of pizza in America, just to do that we take to requite a little backstory of pizza history 101…

So, today, I'm going to trace the history of pizza: an interesting story but at times a tangled narrative. Further down the route, we will do an article on the regional differences that accept influenced different pizza styles. And concluding, we volition visit my list of the all-time pizza in the U.Southward. All, I am happy to say, I tasted.

Most pizza history begins in Naples, Italy, as if the Neapolitans cooked up the idea out of the air. Really, flatbreads date back to Neolithic times (12,000 yrs ago). Civilizations throughout the Mediterranean developed their own versions. In fact, at that place is practiced evidence that the ancient Greeks brought plakous (their flat and round cheese pie) to southern Italia when they colonized the coastal areas between the eighth and fifth centuries B.C. Pita (which means pie in modern Greek) refers to a leavened flatbread and might be the forerunner to "pizza," both the give-and-take and the food.

In that location is practiced evidence that the ancient Greeks brought plakous (their flat and round cheese pie) to southern Italia when they colonized the coastal areas

Where did pizza start

In the Mediterranean Bowl, the idea of a apartment yeast bread covered with baked-in toppings is hardly unique to Italia. Across the French Italian border, Nice (France) has a pessaladiere garnished with caramalized onions, anchovies, garlic and olives. Catalonia (Kingdom of spain) embellishes its coca with red bell peppers, olives, tuna, sardines and onions. The Turkish version of lahmacun from the Arabic for "meat and bread" is slathered with lamb and a love apple mixture and is oftentimes identified as Turkish pizza.

Just the story of pizza actually begins in the sixteenth century when the name was introduced in Naples, or the eighteenth century when Neapolitans tried it with tomato plant, or the nineteenth century when a Neapolitan discovered the perfect pizza pairing of lycopersicon esculentum and mozzarella.

History of the USA Pizza Store

By 1522, tomatoes had fabricated their way over to Europe from the New World. The tomato, though, did not receive a warm welcome; it was greeted with scorn and alarm. Rumors were that tomatoes were poisonous. Europeans, new to the love apple, found its texture doubtable (to say the to the lowest degree) and thought they looked spoiled when ripened.

Eventually, the poor people of Naples who only had flour, cheese, herbs and lard in their sparse pantries, added the vilified tomato to their mix, thus creating a simple pizza.

Founded around 600 B.C. equally a Greek settlement, Naples, Italy, was a thriving waterfront metropolis. Although known as a well-off city, information technology was densely packed with multitudes of working poor who typically lived in shanty homes. The workers needed inexpensive food that could be consumed apace during their days of abiding labor. Thus, pizza (with various toppings) for any meal, sold by street vendors or informed restaurants, met the demand. Evidently, the poor people of Naples were eating some of the earliest pizzas, garnished with tomatoes, cheese, oil, anchovies and garlic just like we practise today.

That'southward Some Existent Pizza History!

In 1830, Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba was opened in Naples. Almost historians consider this to be the world'south first pizzeria. Information technology became a meeting place for artists, students or others with footling money and then, in most cases, the pizza was simple. Wedged between two bookstores, the pizzeria is notwithstanding in business today serving delicious Neapolitan style pizza and some beautiful pastas.

For a long time, pizzas were derided by nutrient writers. Associated with the crushing poverty of the workers, they were oft belittled every bit icky by strange visitors. In 1831, Samuel Morse (the inventor of the telegraph) described pizza as a "species of the most nauseating cake…covered with tomatoes and sprinkled with little fish and blackness pepper and I know not what other ingredients, it altogether looks like a piece of breadstuff that has been taken reeking out of the sewer."

When the first cookbooks appeared in the 19th century, they pointedly ignored pizza. Even those cookbooks devoted to Neapolitan cuisine disdained to mention information technology, despite the fact that there was some improvement in the economic state of affairs of the poor such that they were really giving rise to pizza restaurants.

In that location is an old saying that when fable becomes fact, print the legend. The storyline in about every pizza history is that pizza became mainstream and accustomed past the well-to-do because of royalty. Legends hold that the Italian King Umberto and Queen Margherita visited Naples in 1889.

After they tired of French cuisine (a mainstay of European royalty), Raffaele Esposito of Pizzeria Brandi was summoned to ready a variety of pizzas for the bored Queen. Her favorite was the pizza alle mozzarella. Red tomatoes, white mozzarella and green basil: the colors of the newly unified Italy's flag. In her honor, Esposito named the pizza Margherita. Brandi Pizzeria received a give thanks you note signed by Galli Camillo, caput of table of the royal household, dated June 1889. Brandi proudly displayed the thank y'all note.

But historians studying the seal of the letter and comparing the handwriting to other documents written by Camillo concluded this is a forgery. Also, half dozen years before the supposed meeting with the queen, Esposito was petitioning the Naples government to let him call his restaurant "Pizzeria della Regina d'Italy" or Pizzeria of the Queen of Italy. Getting people to believe royalty ate his food was a long term hustle by Esposito, and his tenacity allowed him to fool the earth. Pizzeria Brandi is all the same in operation and the alphabetic character is framed on a wall.

The Queen of Pizza

In the end, alphabetic character or not, Esposito made a major contribution to the pizza world. Research concludes that he was the first Neapolitan to wednesday mozzarella to tomatoes...and for that we should be grateful.

If you read pizza histories, over 95% will report the Queen Margherita story verbatim. It's merely not truthful and confounds me that people who take stances as authorities echo information technology! Pizza was slow to motility out of Naples, but the move was eventually spurred by immigration. Between 1880 and 1950, more than 25 meg Italians left Italy in search of work heading to other parts of Europe, the Americas, and the residual of the world.

Pizza In America

Immigrants from Naples were replicating their pizzas in New York and other American cities including Trenton, New Haven, Boston, Chicago and St. Louis. The Neapolitans were coming for manufactory jobs (as did millions of Europeans in the late 19th century and early 20th century). They weren't seeking to make a culinary statement. Nevertheless, pizzas were condign popular because of the sheer number of Italian immigrants. Neapolitans and southern Italians opened bakeries and grocery stores that fed other Italian immigrants. However, for the most part it remained a metropolis thing, an ethnic thing, and few non-Italians in the first half of the 20th century had ever heard of pizza.

At present, we have reached another 'print the legend' state of affairs. Folklore has long held that Gennaro Lombardi was the founder of the start pizzeria in the United States. Legend has it that he received his business license in 1905 for a pizzeria at 53½ Spring Street in NYC. This "fact" has always been a closed case. But there is a trivial more to the story with contempo research. It seems that another man, Filippo Millone, who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1890'south, probably started vi pizzerias…including the one Lombardi took over. What does this mean? That Millone is the father of pizza in America, non Lombardi, who was fresh off the gunkhole and merely 18 years one-time when the eating house that bears his proper noun was supposed to accept begun.

Pizza History facts

Millone seems to have made pizza in Naples and he arrived in New York in 1892. Records are sketchy, names misspelled, just one immigration note lists him equally a pastry chef, probably a mistake by an official that had never heard of a pizza maker. Business directories testify that a Filippo Millone opened a grocery store at 53½ Bound Street in 1897. Past 1898, he was advertising pizza for auction at this location in local newspapers. By 1901, the shop was owned by a Giovanni Santillo, and in 1905 there is an advertizement in a local Italian newspaper for a business called Antica Pizzeria Napolitana with Santillo listed as the caput pizza maker.

Also effectually this time, in that location are business directories indicating that Millone opened a pizzeria on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village called John'southward. Thus, Lombardi never owned a pizzeria in 1905. There are no records of him applying for a license. In that location is a famous picture of him at 53 ½ Spring Street (probably taken in 1908) continuing in front of a sign maxim "Lombardi's." Yet, in 1909, Francisco B. Errico was listed as possessor of the restaurant.

Dean Martin And Pizza History

What to make of all this? Gennaro Lombardi was certainly an early on pioneer of New York City pizza, but he is only one of many people.

Filippo Millone had no family and is cached in an unmarked grave in Queens, simply if we look at the record, he is the unknown father of pizza in the Usa.

The first pizzerias in the U.S. were visited mainly past Italian immigrants and were probably hang out spots for men, especially in the evening. In the 20's and 30'south, they started to proliferate, and some even boldly advertised that "women were welcome." Encounter the end of this article our favorite pizzerias still in operation today.

Even so, pizza however remained an immigrant thing, an inner metropolis thing. Nevertheless, booming popularity was on the horizon, and subsequently WWII, pizza became a fast food darling as delectable as other mail war imports like Gina Lollolbridgida.

Our story has to pause equally nosotros attain another 'impress the legend, not the fact' scenario. Media accounts (and many, many pizza histories) attribute pizza's growing popularity later on the state of war to soldiers who tried it in Italia during WWII and yearned for it back in the States. In truth, the invasion of Italia was achieved by a limited number of U.S. troops, maybe 15% of the full troops in Europe. There were many more troops in Nippon, England, France and Western Europe. And at the time, pizza was a regional dish confined to southern Italian republic and Naples, so non many soldiers would have tasted it.

The Starting time Pizzerias In America That Are Still Open Today!

1910 – Joe's Tomato Pie – Chambersburg section of Trenton, NJ

1912 – Papa'south Tomato Pie – Chambersburg section of Trenton, NJ

1924 – Anthony "Totonno" Pero opened Totonno's Pizza in Coney Isle, NY

1925 – Frank Pepe opens Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napolitana in New Haven, CT

1926 – Pizzeria Regina opens in Boston, MA

1929 – Marra's opens in Philadelphia, PA

1933 – Patsy'due south opens in E Harlem, NYC

1934 – Sciortino begins business in Perth Amboy, NJ

American GI'southward Eating Pizza In Naples Is Unlikely!

Also, when U.S soldiers reached Naples at the finish of the state of war, Naples was destitute. Neapolitans had get so desperate that they really emptied out the city'due south aquarium and ate all the fish. Information technology is highly unlikely that soldiers were eating pizza in Naples.

From the 1950'southward and onward, the rapid pace of economic and technological changes in the U.Southward. changed pizza's identify in America forever. As Italian Americans (and their food) migrated from city to suburb, from due east to due west, the popularity of pizza boomed. Pizza spread throughout the media and culture. Lucille Ball picked up a shift at a pizza parlor in an episode of I Love Lucy , and a have out pizza showed upward in a Jackie Gleason HoneyMooners episode. And, of form, Dean Martin had a number i hit with "Amore".

Stars like Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, and Jimmy Durante were seen eating pizza. Pizza was losing its ethnic connotation. Information technology was at present threatening the preeminence of the hot dog and hamburger.

2 major developments pushed pizza to the forefront. The first was domestication. As disposable income grew, and fridges and freezers became common, and demand for convenience foods grew, thus the development of frozen pizza. In 1957, Celentano Bros. introduced the first supermarket frozen pizza. The second change was the commercialization of pizza. With the growing availability of cars and motorcycles, information technology became possible to deliver fully cooked foods to customers' doors…and pizza was amidst the get-go dishes to be delivered. Pizza Hut opened in 1958. Little Caesars in 1959 and Dominic's (later renamed Domino'south) in 1960. Domino's especially stressed quick commitment.

Paradoxically, the effect of these changes was to make pizza more standardized and more subject to variation. While a dough base topped with layers of tomato and cheese became the staple, the need to appeal to customer's desire for variety led to many elaborate pies.

Today'due south pizzas are, in most cases, far removed from the simple offerings sold by street vendors in Naples hundreds of years ago. Withal, pizza is still pizza…any the toppings.

Pizza History 101

Pizza is the world's favorite fast food, though when made right, information technology could be a slow food. Nosotros eat information technology everywhere: at home, in restaurants, on street corners. Some three and a half billion pizzas are sold a twelvemonth in the U.S. alone…that's an average of 48 slices per person! World wide, it's a 145 billion dollar business…all from very humble beginnings. If yous want to eat your way through this history listed below are some of the most influential Pizzeria's still operating in the U.Southward.

2505 Bridge Ave,
Signal Pleasant Embankment, NJ 08742-4260

Established 1910