An eager crowd gathered to celebrate Hapa Pizza’s opening in 2023. While great pizza abounds in the Pacific Northwest, the Beaverton, Oregon, restaurant took a novel approach. Its airy, char-spotted crust resembled a classic Neapolitan but was adorned with toppings like tender brisket and pho broth cooked into a heady reduction. Thanks to a constellation of creative chefs combining cuisines and regional influences, pizza culture across the US is evolving.
You’ll find warmly spiced Bengali beef pizza in Plano, Texas, and pies served with al pastor and a sidecar of pineapple in Cleveland, Mississippi. Our cultural obsession with dough reached a fever pitch during the pandemic and “brought new pizza makers from non-Italian or non-white backgrounds into the game,” according to Adam Kuban, a writer who has been making pizza and documenting its evolution for over two decades. Many of the pizzerias on this list are led by chefs who taught themselves to make dough at home during the pandemic, experimenting with flour blends, hydration levels, and baking temperatures until they liked their results. They mix styles and moonlight as structural engineers to ensure their crusts hold up the heft of elote, khao soi, or fried chicken.
Culture-combining craft pizzerias used to be outliers. Now, thanks to new tools, free-spirited experimentation, and a swell of diner excitement, they’re reshaping pizza culture in the US.
The latitude for this sort of quirk and creativity has only proven a recent possibility for many chefs. With craft pizza now widely available across America, diners are trained to know the good stuff when they see it. As people in major cities and small towns show an appetite for new pizza styles, and social media makes it easier to reach a target audience, chefs have a clear blueprint for success. “When I think back 15 years, I can’t imagine Boogy & Peel being able to exist,” Rachael Jennings says. At her DC pizzeria, which opened in 2022, she makes cheeky pies inspired by deli sandwiches and iconic fast-food items. “People are feeling more comfortable, a little bit more bold with what we’re willing to put on a pizza.”
This list is organized alphabetically.
Ananas Pizzeria
1106 8th Ave, Seattle
Photos by Kyle Johnson
Khampaeng Panyathong has never been to New York, which has a liberating effect. “I’m definitely not trying to do any New York–style pizza,” the chef says. Instead, he creates pies that reflect his path from a refugee camp in Thailand to Seattle, where his family relocated in 1987. His tribute to their native Laos is a pie laced with khao-soi-spiced pork and umami-rich lardons cured in a mixture of garlic and sticky rice. Another, inspired by the iconic chicken bake loved by Costco fans, is topped with bacon, chives, and a drizzle of Caesar dressing. Panyathong blends up to four flours to achieve a crust that is foldable and puffy around the perimeter, with the subtle sweetness of the chain pizzas he coveted as a kid. Even now, Panyathong prefers the mellow plushness of a Domino’s or Pizza Hut to the chew and crunch of a New York slice. “That’s why my pizza is soft and tender,” he says. “It brings back nostalgia.”
Boogy & Peel
1 Dupont Circle NW Suite 115, Washington, DC
Photos by Kimberly Kong/ NOM Digital, unless noted
There’s a streak of humor coursing through chef Rachael Jennings’s pizzeria. One particularly popular pie is inspired by the McDonald’s Big Mac, complete with well-browned and judiciously seasoned ground beef, pinkish “special sauce,” a deluge of iceberg lettuce, and gooey American cheese on a light but sturdy crust—all that’s missing is the sesame seed bun. The young chef has a proclivity for rich flavors and jokey combinations, but her culinary rigor shines through in mash-ups like a Reuben-ified number sporting pastrami, sharp sauerkraut, and an ingenious pinch of caraway powder to mimic rye bread. “There’s definitely some people who come in with a much more traditionalist mindset, and they’re like, ‘What the hell is this?’” Jennings says. “There’s plenty of those people that we can win over if I can get them to stick around and actually try one of the pies.”
Cuts & Slices
Multiple locations, New York
Photos by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
In a city of at least 1,000 pizzerias, Randy and Ashlee Mclaren knew they’d have to break through a lot of noise. At Cuts & Slices, which the couple opened in 2018 in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, pizzas reference the many foods New Yorkers turn to for comfort and convenience. An early hit was a decadent chopped cheese pie topped with ground beef, onions, peppers, and a drizzle of sriracha ketchup. Others are inspired by Randy’s Trinidadian background and Ashlee’s Southern roots, featuring shrimp stained with yellow curry powder or bits of craggy fried chicken and chunks of waffle. On a whim one day, Randy put on a pot of brown stew oxtails, gingerly deboned them by hand after eight hours, and blanketed a pizza in the sweet, sticky mixture. On Instagram, the pie went mega-viral and the shop’s success snowballed. Three locations and nearly half a million social media followers later, Cuts & Slices has opened the floodgates for chefs to do pizza their way. “You’re seeing so many more people starting to use pizza as a canvas,” Randy says. “You can create your own style.”
Dolo’s Pizza
Multiple locations, Atlanta
Photos by Anitra Isler
The concept for this Caribbean-inflected pizzeria can be traced to a trip Yusef Walker took to Jamaica, where the chef happened upon a pizza shop owned by an Italian expat. “It was the best food that I had on that entire trip,” says Walker, whose parents hail from the island nation. A few years later, when a pizzeria behind his Atlanta home went out of business, it felt like a sign. He taught himself to bake from cookbooks and instructional videos, and by the time Dolo’s opened in 2022, Walker had developed a winning dough made with local flour and fermented for at least two days. A zingy charcoal pesto forms the ink-black base for a pie interspersed by bright pops of blistered tomato. On others, Walker nods to his Jamaican and Cuban heritage with morsels of jerk chicken and caramelized lobes of plantain. He offers equally inspired add-ons that include pomegranate molasses, plantain chips, and local honey, encouraging diners to create their own pizzas and “take themselves away on a little adventure.”
Hapa Pizza
12755 SW Broadway St, Beaverton, OR
Photos by Michael Raines
Hapa Pizza is an extension of Aaron and Natalie Truong’s relationship. While Aaron grew up on a steady diet of his parents’ Chinese and Vietnamese cooking as a first-generation American, pizza was a childhood staple for Natalie, whose family has lived in America for generations. “When we got married, I wanted to learn how to make pizza for her because that’s something that she loved,” says Aaron, who had no prior cooking experience. He blended flours to bridge the textural gap between a Neapolitan and New York–style dough, creating an airy, golden crust. Instead of adhering to the flavors of a single culture, Hapa encompasses an array of Asian cuisines. One of the most popular pizzas is an ode to the banh mi Aaron ate after church as a kid. The sandwich is gloriously transformed into a pizza strewn with strips of pickled daikon and carrots, lemongrass-marinated pork, and a squeeze of sriracha-spiked aioli.
Leña Pizza + Bagels
331 Cotton Row, Cleveland, MS
Photos by Rory Doyle
Like many tourists, Rory and Marisol Doyle fell in love with pizza in Naples. In 2023 the husband-wife duo opened their own pizzeria in Cleveland, Mississippi, a city of about 10,000 in the heart of the Delta. “In the beginning there was a little bit of skepticism,” says Marisol, who leads the kitchen. With no nearby Neapolitan pizzerias, diners weren’t accustomed to the wood-fired crust and pools of low-moisture mozzarella she had worked to perfect. As people warmed to her style, it gave the chef room to grow. Some of her most dynamic pies now call back to her childhood in Sonora, Mexico. She festoons them with tender pulled pork and bright homemade salsa roja or smoky chorizo and roasted potatoes. As word spreads, diners travel across the state to try the unique pies transforming Cleveland, MS, into a pizza destination.
SauceBros Pizza
3115 W Parker Rd Ste #570, Plano, TX
Photos by Desiree Rios
Some Bangladeshi chefs in the US label their food as Indian, hoping to reach an audience unfamiliar with their cuisine. When Redwan Huda and Labib Tarafdar set out to open a pizzeria in 2022, the two friends took a different tack. “We’re trying to put our culture on the map,” Huda says. To develop the toppings for their proudly Bangladeshi pizzas, the two home cooks, both born in the capital city of Dhaka, turned to cooking videos on YouTube. They spent the pandemic fine-tuning toppings that include balachao, a powerful fermented shrimp dish that brings an otherwise tame mozzarella pie roaring to life. They cook with pungent mustard oil and top their three-day-fermented crust with cilantro pesto, beef slow-cooked with garam masala, and mushrooms sautéed in ghee. Spurred by a warm reception to their initial concept, they created new pies inspired by Korean barbecue, beef tacos, and Alfredo pasta. “Why restrict ourselves with just Bengali flavors?” Huda figured. “Let’s do more.”
Superkhana International
3059 W Diversey Ave, Chicago
Photos by Evan Jenkins
The chile cheese naan at Superkhana International sure looks like pizza, a golden ring of crust encircling an expanse of caramelized mozzarella and Amul cheese. Then again, the restaurant’s seasonally inspired pizzas carry the faint but unmistakable tang of naan. “Sometimes we call it a pizza, sometimes we call it a naan,” says Zeeshan Shah, who opened Superkhana International with his friend Yoshi Yamada in 2019. At their lighthearted, globe-trotting Indian restaurant, blurred lines lead to culinary revelations. Their salty, yogurt-rich dough is topped with dill-packed beef keema and folded into calzones bursting with butter chicken. Even the unassuming tomato sauce spread across a Margherita pizza is rendered hauntingly deep and savory thanks to a bit of tomato achar. The response from Chicago diners has been overwhelmingly positive, but none matters more to the chefs than that of older South Asian diners who come in for dinner with their families. As they walk the dining room, the pair sometimes catch aunties taking their first approving bites, Shah says, “which is pretty big for us.”