Best Pizza in New York 2026

Lucali is an exercise in restraint. The menu is a pie and a calzone — that is the menu. Mark Iacono mixes the dough by hand at four in the afternoon, stretches every pizza himself, and snips basil onto the crust just before it goes into the brick oven. No phone reservations. No card. BYOB, and you should bring something serious — the Italian wine shop two blocks south stocks Barolo for exactly this purpose. The crust is thin in the centre and crackles into a serious cornicione; the sauce is bright San Marzano with no sugar; the mozzarella is hand-pulled at a counter three feet from the oven. Closed Tuesdays. The wait on Friday clears two hours.

Anthony Mangieri's relationship to dough is closer to religion than craft. He mills no flour, he allows no microwaves, he refuses to put a topping on a pie that compromises the bake. The menu is six pies — Margherita, Marinara, Bianca, Filetti, Cosacca, and the seasonal Apollonia (made only when San Marzano tomatoes are at the right point of the year). The Filetti — cherry tomatoes, garlic, basil, fior di latte — is the test pie. The room is small (forty seats), the oven runs at 905°F, the bake takes ninety seconds, and Mangieri is at the peel almost every service. Reservations open on Tock four weeks ahead and clear in under a minute for Friday and Saturday.

L'Industrie did what was supposed to be impossible: knocked Joe's off the throne of the New York slice conversation. The burrata slice — a plain round base, baked, then crowned with a knob of burrata, prosciutto, and a basil leaf at the counter — is the dish that did it. The Sicilian pepperoni square is the alternative test order, with cup-and-char pepperoni that drips into the dough during the bake. The Williamsburg shop is twelve seats and a counter; the West Village branch (opened 2023, on Christopher Street) is bigger and easier to actually sit at. The dough is a 60% hydration overnight cold ferment, which shows in the texture of the cornicione.

Di Fara has been on Avenue J since 1965, and from 1965 until 2020 Domenico DeMarco was the only person allowed to touch the dough. After his passing in 2022, the family took over the line with the recipe intact: three cheeses grated by hand, San Marzano sauce, basil snipped fresh onto the pie at the counter, olive oil poured from a green glass bottle over the finished slice. The square pie is the order — twelve slices, $32, photographed more often than any other pizza in Brooklyn. The trip is part of the meal: the Q train south to Midwood, the ten-block walk, the wait outside, the cash.

Roberta's opened in a Bushwick cinderblock building in 2008 and rewrote the conversation about Brooklyn pizza. The Bee Sting — soppressata, mozzarella, tomato, chili, and honey — is the menu fixture and the dish most cribbed by other wood-fire shops in the city. The Speckenwolf (cremini, red onion, oregano, mozzarella, speck) is the alternative order. The dough is a 70% hydration overnight rise that builds genuine leoparding on the cornicione. The restaurant programme is full — there are oysters, pastas, vegetable plates — and the wine list is honest. Patio in summer is the right room; the back dining room is the right room in winter.

Joe Pozzuoli opened the original Joe's on Bleecker and Carmine in 1975 and the recipe has not moved meaningfully in fifty years. The plain cheese slice is the test order: hand-tossed dough, low-moisture mozzarella, sweet tomato sauce, dollar bills folded into the tip jar by visitors who have eaten enough pizza in their lives to know that this is the city's reference point. The Sicilian square is the alternative if it is on the rack — order the corner piece. Carmine Street is the original counter; the Bedford Avenue and Times Square branches make the same pizza and are correct stops at different hours of the day.

Scarr Pimentel learned the slice business at Sal & Carmine's on the Upper West Side and at 99¢ Fresh Pizza in Midtown before opening his own shop on Orchard Street in 2016. He mills his own whole-grain flour — a percentage of the dough is freshly milled white wheat from a small Vermont source — and the slice has a slightly nuttier, more honest base than the city's lineage cheese slice. The room is small (sixteen seats) but it has tables, which sets it apart from the rest of the slice category. Closes at 11:00 PM weekdays; later on weekends.

Prince Street's spicy pepperoni square — cup-and-char pepperoni laid in a four-by-four grid over vodka sauce on a focaccia-style base — became the most-photographed slice in New York around 2019 and never quite let go of the title. The line on Prince Street between Mott and Elizabeth runs the length of the block on a Saturday. The pizza itself is genuinely good, and the corner pieces (where the cheese caramelises against the pan) are the order. We rank it eighth because the wait is unjustified on a tourist evening — but in a city of slice options, on a quiet weekday afternoon, the square earns its place.