Once confined to the five boroughs, the classic street snack has now gone fully nationwide.
Listen to this article · 11:24 min Learn more
The founder of Serious Eats and the host of the podcast “Special Sauce,” Ed Levine has eaten thousands of slices of pizza in 25 states.
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.”
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.