United States · 4 spots selected · last checked 2026-09-18
New Haven calls its pizza apizza, says it 'ah-BEETS', and does not much care whether the rest of the world follows. The form is thin, oblong, charred hard at the edge and dressed sparely - a Neapolitan tradition carried by emigration from Amalfi and Naples and then left alone for a century. The city's own Holy Trinity is Pepe's, Sally's and Modern, and researching them turned up the fact this record exists to state plainly: Modern has not been coal-fired since about 1967, when the coke it burned stopped being produced locally. A definition of apizza built on coal would cut one of the three founders out of it.
Population
138,774 (as of 2025-07-01)
Boundary
The city of New Haven, Connecticut. It is its own city record and never part of New York.
Frank Pepe, an immigrant from Maiori near Naples, opened his pizzeria on Wooster Street in 1925 after years selling tomato pies from a wagon in the Wooster Square market; the family moved to the current address in 1936 or 1937 and still fires a custom-built coal oven, replicated at every location from the original. The family's own site says the dough recipe is unchanged since Frank Pepe created it, and current pizzaiolo Gary Bimonte has explained why coal, at roughly 1,000°F, gives the crust its char.
Sally's Apizza was founded in 1938 by Salvatore "Sally" Consiglio, nephew of Frank Pepe, a block away on Wooster Street, and it still bakes in a coal-fired oven — photographed and described as such by the New Haven Register in coverage of its 2017 sale. The Consiglio family sold the business to Lineage Hospitality that year but Bobby and Rick Consiglio, Sally's grandsons, stayed on as managers rather than owners.
Opened in 1934 as Tony Tolli's coke-fired (a coal byproduct) State Street Apizza and renamed Modern in 1944, the pizzeria is one of the city's 'Holy Trinity' alongside Frank Pepe's and Sally's, but its oven is the editorially interesting exception: it switched from coke to an oil-fired brick oven around 1967 when coke production stopped in New Haven, so it is not coal-fired like its two Wooster Street rivals. William "Billy" Pustari has owned Modern since 1988.
BAR opened in 1991 as a bar and dance club and added a brick-oven pizza programme in 1996; unlike the coal-fired Wooster Street pizzerias, its oven is gas-fired. Its mashed potato and bacon pizza — hand-mashed potatoes and brick-oven bacon on a white pie — is still described locally as the secret handshake of New Haven's pizza scene, and locals sometimes count BAR alongside Pepe's, Sally's and Modern as a 'Big Four'.
