9 of the best pizzas in the US and where to try them

14.06.2024 - 12:23 / lonelyplanet.com / Wolfgang Puck / Ellis Island

Jun 13, 2024 • 13 min read

Like much of the food people eat in the United States today, pizza arrived on American shores via immigration patterns.

In the second half of the 19th century, famine, job shortages and poverty forced people to leave their homelands for America, which was perceived as the land of economic opportunity at the time. One of those groups were Italians, mostly from impoverished southern Italy. Between 1880 and the early 1920s, more than four million Italians had come through Ellis Island. 

In addition to bringing their cultural customs, these Italians carried their own food recipes with them, including a cheese-and-tomato-sauce baked bread called “pizza.” The first pizzeria in the country opened in 1905: Lombardi’s – still located in Manhattan’s Little Italy – churned out thin-crust, coal-fired pizzas that were mostly eaten by homesick Italian immigrants. 

It wasn’t until after WWII that pizza began to go mainstream. That’s when two things happened: American GIs who’d been stationed in Italy, came back with a craving for more pizza and Italian-Americans began moving up into the middle class and relocating to the suburbs, bringing their pizza with them and introducing this “ethnic food” it to a whole new hungry and curious audience of eaters. 

Today, pizza is popular with pretty much everyone in the US. According to statistics published in 2024, there are over 80,000 pizzerias (that’s around 10% of all restaurants) in America today, with estimates that Americans consumer around three billion pizzas per year. And if you travel around the States looking for pizza, there are various regional styles that have evolved and developed as Italian-Americans began settling outside of the big East Coast cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston. 

Here are some of those unique regional American pizza styles.

In the first half of the 1980s, actor Gary Coleman was regularly uttering “Whatchutalkin’bout, Willis?” Prince was prophesizing Armageddon in his song 1999 and California put barbecued chicken on pizza. Leave it to the Golden State to break the rules.

Most food historians credit Alice Waters and her legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse for pioneering the California-style pizza in the early 1980s, but Chef Ed LaDou is the name most associated with it. While working at Prego in San Francisco in 1980, he began experimenting by topping pizzas with things like duck breast and hoisin sauce, stretching the boundaries of the definition of pizza. 

One night, acclaimed chef Wolfgang Puck was eating at Prego and LaDou sent out a pizza topped with paté, mustard, red pepper and ricotta. Puck was so impressed, he offered LaDou a job as the pizza chef at his acclaimed, upscale Beverly Hills eatery Spago.