DOORDASH CUSTOMERS PICKED AMERICA'S TOP 40 PIZZA SHOPS. THE CITY GOT ZERO. BAYPORT GOT ONE.

On October 13, DoorDash published its list of the 40 top-rated local pizza shops in America, timed to National Pizza Month and built, the company says, from customer ratings between September 2025 and September 2026. A shop needs fewer than ten locations and at least 1,000 reviews on the app, and the ones with the highest average rating make the cut. The list is grouped by region, not ranked. Two of the 40 are in New York State. One is Gino's NY Pizza in Buffalo. The other is The Pizzeria at 606 Montauk Highway in Bayport, on the South Shore of Long Island. Time Out New York did the math for the city on October 20 and landed on a number nobody here wanted to read: precisely zero.

The Pizzeria opened in July 2020 at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, run by brothers Paul and Dan Saccoccio and their friend Cliff Weinstein. The Saccoccios came up in the business at Gino's Pizzeria of Ronkonkoma, which Paul runs with his family. Weinstein told Greater Long Island that fall what they were chasing: "Our concept is really bringing the nostalgic, old school slice shop to Long Island."

That October, Dough Hook Hospitality Group bought Tony's Pizzeria in Bayport, where Benny Esposito and his family had sold pies at 606 Montauk Highway for 22 years. The group reopened it under its own name on December 28, 2020, with partners David and Jacob Zwaik and Carlos Delgado. The Bayport-Blue Point Chamber of Commerce cut the ribbon in January 2021.

Then they kept going. Islip's Main Street in 2021. Bay Shore and Lindenhurst after that. Babylon's Main Street in April 2024, with a full bar. Smithtown in April 2025, the seventh. An eighth, in Yaphank, was announced last October, the same month the Islip shop made DoorDash's first list and Dan Saccoccio told Greater Long Island the group was proud of it. This year DoorDash listed the Bayport shop instead. Same group, different storefront, and the menu Time Out describes: round and square pies, the Uncle Benny, the Tri-Fecta, a square white.

So the shop that out-rated every slice in the five boroughs is six years old, has at least seven storefronts, and sits under the ten-location cap DoorDash uses to define a local favorite. No knock on it. That cap is the whole point of the list.

Read the method again. Fewer than ten locations. At least a thousand reviews. Highest average rating. Every one of those conditions rewards consistency, and consistency at one specific moment: the box opening on a kitchen counter, twenty minutes after the pie left the oven, in a house in Bayport, and somebody deciding whether to tap four stars or five. A thousand of those moments, averaged.

The pie that wins is the same on the thousandth order as on the first. It survives the box. It does not sweat into its own crust on the ride down Montauk Highway. A square white travels well. A grandma travels well. A plain slice does not travel at all. It gets eaten in ninety seconds, folded, standing up, on the sidewalk, and the only rating it ever gets is whether you come back tomorrow.

That is the city's product. Joe's has sold it on Carmine Street since 1975, when Joe Pozzuoli opened on the corner of Bleecker and Carmine, and the shop now sits at 7 Carmine with a line that needs no star system. The city's pizza was built for the person standing at the counter. Priced for that, made for that, reheated for that. The line is the review.

DoorDash's own numbers back this up. In 2025 the company moved nearly 30 million pizza orders. New York-style was its fastest-growing major style, up more than 80 percent year over year. White pizza was the most-ordered style on the platform, with more than three million orders. The country is ordering New York pizza from its couch in record numbers. It is just not ordering it from New York.

The 2025 list, published October 7, 2025, was the company's first. It covered five states, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan and New York, with ten shops each, built from January-to-September 2025 ratings under the same cap and floor. New York's ten ran from Oneonta to Rochester to North Tonawanda, and four of them were in the city.

Joe's Pizza, Manhattan, the Carmine Street slice. Rubirosa, at 235 Mulberry in Nolita, where the crust is cracker-thin and the tie-dye pie is a margherita with vodka sauce and pesto swirled over the top. Brooklyn DOP, at 237 Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, opened in June 2022 by Thomas Gian Ardito and Jason Rocco D'Amelio, selling margherita, Sicilian and grandma by the slice; Time Out priced the grandma at $4.50 a slice and $32 a pie that summer. F&F Pizzeria, at 459 Court Street in Carroll Gardens, from the two Franks of Frankies Spuntino, Castronovo and Falcinelli, with Chris Bianco of Phoenix and Chad Robertson of Tartine in on it.

The fifth New York name that matters here was listed as The Pizzeria, Islip, the Main Street shop. One year later the same group's Bayport shop stood alone.

Here is the line the comments will need. "Four to zero" is true, and it is also a change of format. In 2025, New York was one of five states and was guaranteed ten spots. In 2026 there is one national list of 40, split into four regions of ten: Midwest, Northeast, South, West.

The Northeast's ten went like this. Six to Pennsylvania: Oxford, Pottstown, Harrisburg, Downingtown and two in Philadelphia. One to Morristown, New Jersey. One to Greenfield, Massachusetts. Two to New York: Buffalo and Bayport. Philadelphia, a city about a fifth the size of New York, took two. Connecticut, which held ten spots last year, holds zero this year, New Haven included. The only "New York" on the whole list out West is a shop called A Slice of New York Pizza, in San Jose.

So the city did not lose four shops in a year. It lost a guaranteed ten-spot state bracket, then failed to place a single shop in a ten-spot regional bracket that a Bayport storefront and six Pennsylvania shops got into. The second fact is the one worth arguing about. Same rules, same cap, same floor of a thousand reviews, and the highest-rated pizza in the Northeast, by the people paying for it, is in Oxford, Pennsylvania and Bayport, New York, and nowhere in the five boroughs.

Think about who leaves a thousand reviews. Bayport is a hamlet on the Great South Bay with a highway running through it. Dinner there is a phone order, a car, a box, a kitchen table, done hundreds of times at the same shop, because there are not forty others within a ten-minute walk. Loyalty on Long Island is a driving decision, and a driving decision gets rated. Ruth Isenstadt, DoorDash's head of U.S. restaurants, put it plainly in the release: "Every neighborhood has a spot people are fiercely loyal to." On Montauk Highway, fierce loyalty shows up as a five-star tap, a thousand times.

In the city, fierce loyalty shows up as a line. The slice shop on the corner stays open late, sells to people who never open an app for it, and competes with four other slice shops on the same avenue, so the ratings that do come in are split, uneven and rarely a thousand deep for one storefront. Joe's has been rated for fifty years by people who walked in. Rubirosa's pie is a cracker that does not want twenty minutes in cardboard. Brooklyn DOP's grandma slice was $4.50 on a paper plate in 2022, and $4.50 on a paper plate does not generate a review.

The city's pizza is a sidewalk product in a sidewalk economy, and the list that just shut it out is a couch product scored by a couch economy. Both are real. They measure different things.

That is the crowd's verdict, and it is honest on its own terms: the most reliable box of pizza in the Northeast, as rated by the people who paid for it, comes out of Montauk Highway in Bayport. Defend your borough if you want, but defend it for what it is. The city's pizza was never built to be rated from a couch.

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