Razza Pizza Artigianale

The Restaurant

Razza Pizza Artigianale opened on Grove Street in 2012 — owner Dan Richer and partner Fred Shandler — and reset the regional understanding of what pizza could be. The dining room is a single seventy-cover storefront with an exposed wood-fired Acunto oven at the back, open kitchen, polished concrete floors, and the kind of unselfconscious neighbourhood format that the cooking quietly contradicts. Richer trained as a serious obsessive — flour milling from heritage wheat, San Marzano tomatoes from a single Campanian farm, mozzarella made fresh each morning — and his book The Joy of Pizza (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) remains the most carefully researched modern pizza text in English.

The signature plate is the Project Hayseed — a single-origin local-wheat pizza with tomato, mozzarella di bufala, and a finishing of farm cream and basil — and was the dish that anchored the New York Times three-star review (the only three-star pizza review the paper has ever issued). The Margherita runs a textbook 90-second Neapolitan bake and is the room's regulars' choice. The menu's non-pizza side is equally serious: the warm Caputo bread with local honey and Vermont cultured butter is the most-ordered starter in the city, the dry-aged ribeye is the highest-rated steak in Jersey City, and the affogato closes the meal with espresso from Madcap Coffee in Grand Rapids.

The wine list runs a tight 120 references — natural Italian and Old World — with a working sake selection that the staff guides directly. Beer pours from Suarez Family Brewery in upstate New York. Chef-owner Richer has been a James Beard Foundation Outstanding Chef nominee six times — 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 — without yet winning, which the Jersey City dining press treats as one of the field's running scandals. The room takes Resy reservations three to four days ahead and holds bar walk-ins for the wood-fired counter.