Having a 250th birthday may be nice for America, but for New York City, a semiquincentennial is old news. Literally. New York City was founded — depending on who you ask — about 360 years ago, more than a century before the United States. In all that time, we’ve been busy.
New York is widely acknowledged as a hub of industry and creativity, as it should be. Yes, this is land of Wall Street and Ellis Island, of Stonewall and the Statue of Liberty. But alongside the city’s big landmarks are smaller ones, ones you can't necessarily visit, the quirky ideas that emerged from New York's melting pot and spread across the country.
For the next month, we’ll be celebrating the concepts that came from the city (and our beloved neighbor, New Jersey), talking to experts about how the United States would not be what it is without New York City. You’re welcome, America.
First up, pizza. Which New York didn’t invent. Unless, of course, it did.
Italians deserve the most credit for the invention of pizza, but they didn’t come up with it on their own. Its basic form is rooted in flatbreads that the Greeks brought over when they colonized Southern Italy beginning in the eighth century B.C. And the Greeks themselves learned how to bake from the ancient Egyptians.
Pizza "becomes the property of every place where it lands," said Scott Wiener, New York City’s preeminent expert and the founder of Scott’s Pizza Tours.
The Italians eventually landed in New York, adapting their wood-fired Neapolitan methods to the coal-fired ovens they could more easily afford. Despite all the handwringing over what actually constitutes a New York slice — is it the oven? The sauce? The way you do or do not fold it? — Wiener said the answer is simple: It’s just pizza sold by the slice, often served on a flimsy plate. New York popularized this grab-and-go option, which quickly spread westward.
“I think the world is mostly eating American pizza, and America is mostly eating New York-style pizza,” Wiener said about dashing to a slice shop on your lunch break so you don’t get hangry at work, or partying until 2 a.m. and stumbling upon a dollar slice on your way home.
But the slice can serve as more than a utility. True New York pizza lovers might seek out a destination like the world-famous Di Fara in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood, which became one of Wiener’s favorite spots when he moved to the city from New Jersey nearly 20 years ago. Chef Domenico DeMarco opened Di Fara in 1965 and was involved in operations until his death in 2022. His kids keep the place up and running.
Wiener started leading pizza tours at the behest of his close friends, who had accompanied him to pizzerias around the country while they were touring as a band. These pit stops transformed into a full-on sociological study, with Wiener taking note of what set each city’s style apart. He accompanies his walking tours to multiple pizzerias across the city, depending on which iteration the hungry participants sign up for. Sometimes he brings them to Di Fara, where, during a recent visit on a rainy afternoon, he warmly greeted one of DeMarco’s sons, who was working the counter.
“A big difference between the pizza in New York and the pizza everywhere else really [has] to do with the culture around it,” Wiener said between bites of a margherita slice, which he topped with Calabrian chili oil. Grabbing a slice isn’t as much of an afterthought in these parts. It is “the main event.”
Here’s more from Wiener on what makes the New York slice so special.
Scott Wiener: The first time I went to Di Fara, I remember just staring at Dom making the pizza and watching him and realizing that everybody else was here to watch him. I was standing in the middle of the room and somebody turned around to me and said, “I can tell it’s your first time here. So first of all, why don’t you stand in front of me?” Because I’m not very tall. “And second of all,” he said — I’ll never forget these words — “I would trade every slice I’ve ever had here to be you right now, about to eat my first.”
When I take a bite into a slice at Di Fara, I’m not tasting the tomato, I’m not tasting the crust, I’m not tasting the cheese. I’m tasting their unity. When I eat a pizza where there’s one element that’s really standing out to me … it’s no longer the pizza. It’s really good cheese on decent bread.
People always come to the tour with misconceptions about New York-style pizza. They’re surprised that what we eat on the tour that they like the most is the simplest. It has less cheese. It’s a darker bake than they think is what you need to have. It doesn’t have pepperoni. We don’t serve toppings on tours ever, and it shakes people. People from the Midwest might say, “Well, what is it if it doesn’t have sausage or pepperoni?” And then they eat a regular slice of pizza and they realize, “Oh my god, this beautiful simplicity.”
They come in thinking that there’s all this magic. They want to know, “Is it the water?” Which it isn’t. They want to know, “Is coal-fired pizza the best?” And it isn’t. I mean, it’s subjective. They just want there to be more rules than there are, and I think they’re surprised that New York is way more diverse in its pizza scene.
What’s happening in New York is that the multi-generational pizzeria isn’t the one people are talking about so much. Now people are talking about the person who came to pizza-making because they wanted to, not because it was handed down to them. This new era of pizza makers is really all about the food, which separates it from being about the layers of paint on the wall or the fact that the floor is cracked in all the wrong spots. But these new slices are absolutely [still] New York-style pizza. Pizza in New York is constantly changing, and the best stuff is always the stuff that’s most self-aware. They know what they do and why they do it.
The beauty of it is, pizza isn’t a food that’s owned by anybody. But New York is the place where so many Southern Italian immigrants landed and lived in Northern Manhattan, in East Harlem, and later on Arthur Avenue and Mulberry Street and Mott Street and Elizabeth Street, and then the East Village — Second Avenue, First Avenue between 10th and 14th. All these little Italian enclaves, wherever it landed, it completely transformed. So I think the world sees pizza now as an American food.
