Where to Find Great New York Slices in 2025? You Might Be Surprised.

Rexburg, Idaho, may be one of the more unexpected places to find a world-class slice of New York-style pizza. The windswept city, home to B.Y.U.-Idaho, is a three-hour drive from the nearest major airport and 2,200 miles from Manhattan. But from its electric oven, Righteous Slice is serving pizza that would not be out of place in Greenwich Village.

With a proper char on the bottom, the slices stand up to a fold. They are topped with low-moisture whole mozzarella and Grana Padano; the sauce carries the perfect faint sweetness of high-quality canned and steamed tomatoes, and is ringed by a beautiful three-inch-high cornichon, or raised lip, that has numerous charred air bubbles. The crust is thicker and not quite as crisp as, say, a slice at Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Street. But then Joe’s doesn’t have a the Grand Tetons out on the horizon.

“Nobody expects great pizza in Rexburg,” said Bill Crawford, the owner of Righteous Slice. “It’s a small community with a lot of farmers, price-sensitive college students and one of the busiest Little Caesar’s in America. But I believed that great pizza was something people would seek out because it’s craveable.”

Mr. Crawford has never lived in New York City. In fact, he grew up in a double-wide trailer in eastern Oregon. And he had never worked in a pizzeria before he started making Neapolitan-style pizzas in a mobile wood-burning oven towed to farmer’s markets in Rexburg eight years ago. He was an Air Force pilot who flew combat missions in Iraq before earning a master’s degree from Harvard Business School.

“Our New York-style pizza has been the main driver of our growth since we introduced it about three years ago,” he said. “We are now pretty much maxed out on our capacity, but demand keeps growing.”

And that demand isn’t confined to southeastern Idaho.

In the last 25 years, the slice of pizza went from a workaday street snack more or less endemic to the five boroughs to an object of food-nerd fascination far beyond the city. And while you could buy pizza by the slice outside the city — say, at bowling alleys or ballparks — it was rarely up to New York standards. That has changed, however, thanks to entrepreneurial pizzaiolos, pizza evangelists and eager diners.

A great slice can be had at Audrey Jane’s Pizza Garage in Boulder, Colo., or Post Alley Pizza in Seattle. Students in Berkeley, Calif., can enjoy a serious version at Pizzeria da Laura, and in Washington, D.C., knowledgeable pie lovers frequent Slice & Pie. In fact, on the list of the top 10 slice joints published by the respected pizza trade group Pizza Top 50, seven are outside New York City. The slice is now well and truly national.

One of the chief evangelists was Adam Kuban, who started the blog Slice to document his exploration of New York’s pizza scene shortly after he arrived in 2003. Slice joints were everywhere in the city, and had been for decades. Many had the same look and feel: narrow storefronts with a window onto the street so customers could get a slice or two reheated and then eat while walking (like John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.”) But Mr. Kuban was among the first to treat them as subjects worthy of serious culinary consideration.

He also helped codify the form. “New New York slices are made with slightly aged low-moisture or full-cream mozzarella, plain uncooked steamed and canned tomatoes, everyday bread flour, salt, water and yeast,” read the Slice blog. “These slices were baked at 500-600 degrees for 8-10 minutes in a gas-fired Maestro oven, which was introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair at the Maestro Pizza Pavilion. What comes out of those ovens is a slice with a crispy but slightly chewy, thin-ish but not cracker-thin crust that bends but never breaks when folded and eaten.”

According to Scott Wiener, who leads pizza tours of New York and is considered one of the foremost authorities on the city’s pie scene, “Adam created a space for community that inspired curiosity. The growing pizza slice movement is rooted in his work with the Slice blog.”

As slice eaters became more discerning, slice makers began to get more serious about their craft.

In 2009, Frank Pinello, a Brooklyn native, took his chef’s training and love of pizza and opened the first cheffed-up slice shop, Best Pizza in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.

“I grew up in Bensonhurst, where there were so many good old-school slices around the neighborhood,” Mr. Pinello said. “But by the time I started working in restaurant kitchens in New York I found myself surrounded by dollar-slice joints” selling pizza made “with terrible ingredients.”

Mr. Pinello focused on quality ingredients like organic flour and housemade mozzarella. And while his use of a coal-fired oven may not have been canonical New York slice technique, the pizza was a hit, and today Mr. Pinello has three pizzerias.

“The idea was to make and sell great slices that gave mad respect to the old-school slice-pizza ways and used the craft and knowledge I had gained in restaurant kitchens and at the Culinary Institute of America,” Mr. Pinello said.

Craft is also crucial for the 13-time world champion pizza maker Tony Gemignani. Born and raised in Northern California, Mr. Gemignani started making pizza at age 15 in his brother’s pizza shop in Castro Valley, Calif.

When Mr. Gemignani encountered his first New York slice on a visit to the city 20 years ago, he was a changed man. “In California, pizza was just that, pizza. But when I started traveling and visiting places like New York, you understand pizza in a totally different and beautiful way,” he said.

He opened the acclaimed Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco in 2009. Shortly after, he realized that the New York slice was just as deserving of respect as the sanctified whole Neapolitan pizza and coal-fired-oven pies that most pizza nerds lauded. So the following year he opened the first Slice House next door — where the pizza boxes read, “Respect the Craft!” in big, bright red letters.

“I felt that the New York slice at the time didn’t receive enough credit nationwide. For some reason, in many cities and suburbs it became the ’80s and ’90s slice that you would buy at a mall, which I felt left a bad taste in the consumer’s mouth,” Mr. Gemignani said, adding, “The slice concept just needed to be re-looked at, tinkered a bit and executed well.”

With that partly in mind, he also opened Tony Gemignani’s International School of Pizza in 2009. Bill Crawford is a proud alumnus of the school, as are his wife and business partner, Cheryl Crawford; and Audrey Kelly, a co-founder of Audrey Jane’s Pizza Garage; and Laura Meyer of Pizzeria de Laura.

“I’m really proud of the many talented women who came through my school,” said Mr. Gemignani, who closed the school in 2022. “Pizza making has traditionally been a male bastion, but that is rapidly changing.”

Ann Kim is another graduate. A Korean American chef in Minneapolis who moved to the United States as a child, she had fallen in love with New York slices while attending Columbia University in the early 2000s.

In 2012, she and her husband, Conrad Leifur, already ran a successful wood-oven, whole-pie restaurant, Pizzeria Lola, when the couple decided to open a slice joint, Hello Pizza. Although an accomplished chef, Ms. Kim was new to making pizza. That’s where Mr. Gemignani’s school came in.

“I learned so much from Tony,” she said. “He is obsessed with craft. Tony makes pizza making into a spiritual quest.”

At first, many Minnesotans didn’t know what to make of Ms. Kim’s pizza by the slice. “It was a foreign concept,” she said. “People were dumbfounded by the fact that I was putting a slice back in the oven to crisp it up. Customers would ask: ‘Why would you do that? Why are you giving me an old slice?’ ”

Justin Leon faced a similar learning curve at Apollonia’s, the slice shop he opened in Los Angeles in 2012.

“Many people didn’t know what to make of the paper plates the pizza was served on, or the greasy paper bags the slices came in,” he said. “They used to ask us for plastic forks and knives to cut their slices.”

A professional photographer turned pie man, Mr. Leon opened Apollonia’s in a strip mall on Wilshire Boulevard. Leon had been making pizza at restaurants in his East Los Angeles neighborhood since he was a teenager. He spent parts of the next 25 years making a living as a photographer, while moonlighting as a pizza maker when he needed to augment his income.

It cost Mr. Leon $30,000 to open Apollonia’s, but he spent next to nothing on advertising and publicity. By 2012, social media had exploded, and he used his photography skills by posting lots of slice pictures. It turns out that Instagram loves pizza, and slices were being photographed by the millions of people all over the world. It all helped to turn shops like Apollonia’s into destinations.

In some ways, Los Angeles has become New York’s sister city of slices. They are terrific at the Friends & Family Pizza Co. in West Hollywood; the James Beard Award-winning pizzaiolo and chef Chris Bianco opened his extraordinary slice shop, Pane Bianco, downtown in 2022. Shins and LaSorted’s also bake fine examples.

Great slices can be found at any one of Prime Pizza’s seven locations. And there are now six Joe’s locations in Los Angeles (though their relationship to the original Joe’s Pizza in Greenwich Village is complicated), while a branch of NoLIta’s buzzy Prince Street Pizza recently opened in Santa Monica.

The nationalization of the New York slice in some ways is just getting warmed up. Mr. Gemignani, for one, has big plans. So far, he has franchised 16 Slice House locations, with another 130 in development — not to mention 25 licensed locations already open in ballparks and casinos.

For his part, the acclaimed Brooklyn pizzaiolo Paul Giannone has expanded his Paulie Gee’s operation to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Chicago.

While the international pizza consultant Anthony Falco is venturing even farther, taking the slice global. Mr. Falco perfected his pizza-making skills at Roberta’s, the much-written-about Brooklyn pizzeria that opened in 2008, and he has since consulted on slice shops as far afield as Mumbai, Taipei and Mongolia.

“When I first started my pizza consulting business, most of my clients wanted to serve Neapolitan pizza. Now everyone wants New York slices,” Mr. Falco said. “And don’t think it’s easy to find mozzarella in Mongolia.”

Back in Idaho, Bill Crawford is developing a second restaurant, which will only sell slices.

“My son has fallen in love with pizza and wants to take over the pizzerias,” he said. “I think a slice shop will offer him a better opportunity.” But Mr. Crawford will still be making pizza every day somewhere. As for many of his New York-slice contemporaries, joy is the common ingredient.

“I am going to happily spend the rest of my life tinkering with my slices,” he said. “Making pizza is every bit as exciting to me as flying an F-16. I absolutely love making pizza.”

Brian Gallagher contributed reporting.