Fried pizza is real and New York is currently experiencing its first real dose in the deep fryer. It's soft with a thin crisp on the outside, deceivingly light and airy, and unbelievably addictive, but what exactly is it and where does it come from? More

Have you ever noticed the creepy guy hanging out in Neapolitan pizzerias? No, not Adam Kuban. I'm talking about Pulcinella. He's always wearing a puffy white getup, matching white hat, and a black mask with a long, pointy nose. Maybe you haven't noticed him, but Pulcinella is usually within ten feet of most wood-fired ovens in the form of paintings and figurines. Who is this guy and why is he associated with pizza? We'll have to go back a few centuries to find out. More

Michael Berman of Pizzacentric has harnessed the power of the Yellow Pages to chart the growth of pizza domination in the most pizza loving city in the States. Using microfilm records of old phone books, Berman was able to compile date to create this graph that says a lot about the culinary history of pizza in NYC. More

It's very likely that other pizzerias used the name Ray before Ralph Cuomo (I found evidence of at least two), but none lasted long enough to be affiliated with the current situation. The pizzeria at 27 Prince Street truly is Patient Zero for the Ray's epidemic. Plenty has already been written about the confusing ownership of the various Ray's locations, so I'm going to give as quick a summary as possible by tracing the lineage through a collection of business licenses and phone books I have collected over the years. More

The once-necessary-then-obsolete-now-re-popularized coal oven has an interesting past that traces the story of pizza development in the Northeastern USA. Those who have experienced the goodness of a coal-fired oven may take for granted the resulting pizza's crisp yet chewy texture, but how did these chunks of black rock get into our ovens? More

Most Slice'rs probably agree that pizza is best served directly from the oven, but over 1 billion pizzas are delivered each year and every single one of them is transported to its destination in a simple cardboard box. The contemporary pizza box remains as anonymous as it is simple, as few of its users know anything about the cardboard coffin's humble origins. Let's dig a little deeper into the history of the pizza box to provide some context for an item most of us view as a necessary evil in the life of a pizza eater. More

The contemporary pizza consumer is pretty well-versed in the language of Neapolitan pizza. We know what a wood-fired brick oven looks like, we appreciate San Marzano tomatoes and we've tasted mozzarella di bufala. We even know where to go in Naples for the most historic pizzerias on the planet. But what about other pizza styles that bare Italian pedigrees? More

Check out this amazing piece of pizza history. It's a pizza roundup from a 1970 issue of New York magazine, the goal of which was to find the best pizza in New York City. Written by Jerome Snyder and Milton Glaser, the originators of the magazine's "Underground Gourmet" column, it just may be the city's first "Best Pizza in NYC" article. More

I'll just say it: Lombardi's is kind of a big tourist thing. After having been hyped in countless national newspaper and magazine stories, guidebooks, and travel shows, this "first pizzeria in America" is pretty much packed any night of the week with people more likely to hail from Manhattan, Kansas, than Manhattan Manhattan. (OK, that's probably an exaggeration, but poetic license, you know?) More

Two Fridays ago I reviewed Pizza-Town USA in Elmwood Park, New Jersey. I was just digging through some notes from that when I found Pizza-Town's take-out menu, on the back of which is reprinted the pizzeria's first-ever review, a rundown from the July 25, 1958 edition of the now-defunct Paterson Morning Call. After the jump, that review in full, plus some video from Pizza Town. More