Frank Pepe and the Apizza

Frank Pepe came to New Haven from the town of Maiori on the Amalfi Coast of Italy in nineteen oh nine. He was sixteen years old. He spent several years working in local factories before he became a baker, and then a street vendor, pushing a cart through the Wooster Street neighborhood selling tomato pies, flatbreads baked with tomato, oil, and garlic, no cheese, no mozzarella, pulled from a coal-fired brick oven and sold by the slice.

In nineteen twenty-five he opened a proper shop on Wooster Street. He called it a pizzeria, from the Neapolitan tradition he had grown up in. New Haveners called what he made apizza, a local pronunciation rooted in the southern Italian dialects that the neighborhood's immigrant workers brought with them. The coal-fired oven produced a crust that was thin, slightly charred at the edges, chewy at the center. Mozzarella was optional, not automatic. The tomato base was often the whole point.

The white clam pie came about through proximity. A vendor named Bear Boccamiello sold fresh clams on the half shell from the alleyway between two Wooster Street pizzerias. Workers started eating clams at the bar. Someone put them on a pizza. Pepe's version used olive oil, oregano, grated cheese, chopped garlic, and freshly shucked littleneck clams. No tomato sauce. No mozzarella. The pizzeria still insists on clams shucked fresh. They do not use canned.

The James Beard Foundation named Pepe's an American Classic in nineteen ninety-nine. The Guardian named it the best pizza on earth in two thousand and nine. Frank Pepe's grandchildren still help run the restaurant.