Pizza
There is an ongoing debate over the ubiquitous American food called pizza, including what is and is not a pizza. But there is no dispute over the first pizzeria in the United States. That distinction belongs to the city of New York and an Italian immigrant named Gennaro Lombardi. Lombardi emigrated to the United States in 1897, settling in the Little Italy section of New York City. He opened a small grocery store on Spring Street, in an area which included several factories and other businesses. He began to develop a lunch trade from many of the workers in the area.
To accommodate them he began to sell pizzas, as they were prepared in his native Italy, in the fashion of the Neapolitan pies with which he was familiar. Gradually he adapted them to appeal to the tastes of many of his American customers. He used ovens which where heated with coal rather than the wood fired ovens of Naples. Italians prefer a type of mozzarella cheese made from the milk of the Italian Water Buffalo. Lombardi found Americans to prefer a milder form of mozzarella which is made from cow’s milk, and was far less expensive since it didn’t need to be imported.
Lombardi’s pies became so popular that to meet demand he opened a pizzeria after receiving a restauranteur license. He named the restaurant Lombardi’s, the first pizzeria in the United States when it opened in 1905. Lombardi’s pies were huge, as big as twenty inches in diameter, and were thin crusted. Despite the lesser amount of crust, the pies were too large for one person to consume at one sitting so Lombardi implemented the sale of pies by the slice, at a time when a whole pie could be had for a nickel.
It was not unusual for customers waiting in line at lunchtime to bicker over the availability of special pies, concerned that the pizza cooks would be out of their favorite when their turn to be waited on came up. The etiquette and welcome later parodied in the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld were preceded by Lombardi’s, where cooks were known to banish customers without their pies for unseemly behavior while waiting in line, or when ordering their desired pizza. As time went on more and more competition for pizza developed in New York and nationally.
One of Lombardi’s employee’s left to found Totonno’s in Coney Island after the subway was extended, banking on the traffic which the new rail connection would generate. Today pizzerias are seemingly as common as grass, and there are many different styles of pizza, some with toppings which no doubt Gennaro Lombardi would have found bizarre. Today, Americans eat about 350 slices of pizza per second, and there are more than 60,000 pizzerias in the United States. That doesn’t count the pizzas purchased in grocery and convenience stores. It all started with Gennaro Lombardi’s pizzeria in New York.