Italian Judges Put Eleven New York Pizzerias in America's Top Fifty. Here Is Every Rank

On Monday we showed you a national pizza list built from delivery-app ratings: forty spots, and not one in the five boroughs. Long Island got in. The city did not. Here is the other jury. On May 27, 2026, at a theater in Chelsea, 50 Top Pizza, the Italian guide that sends anonymous inspectors to eat in person, announced its ranking of the fifty best pizzerias in the United States. Eleven are in New York City. Number one is Una Pizza Napoletana, at 175 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. In September the same guide's World list put it second on earth, behind only Napoli on the Road in London. New Haven, which has called itself the pizza capital of America for decades, got one entry, at number 34, and it is none of the three names New Haven would have picked.

50 Top Pizza is run out of Italy by three people: Barbara Guerra, Albert Sapere and Luciano Pignataro. It publishes national guides and one World list, and the ranks come from in-person visits by inspectors who do not announce themselves. The guide says it scores how well a pizzeria looks after the person at the table, starting with what lands on the plate. In practice, and the trade press says it out loud, the guide leans Neapolitan: a soft, naturally leavened dough, a very hot oven, a short bake, a pizza eaten at the table within minutes of coming out. Guerra, at the New York ceremony, told the room, “What stands out year after year is the incredible richness of this country.”

Put that next to Monday's jury. DoorDash's list took a year of customer ratings, September 2025 to September 2026, required at least a thousand reviews and fewer than ten locations, and crowned whoever held the highest average. That method rewards a pie that is the same on the thousandth order as the first and still looks right after thirty minutes in a cardboard box. The Italian method rewards a pie that is gone in eight minutes because it will not survive nine. One jury scores the box. The other scores the oven. Both are honest about it, which is why the two lists do not overlap at all.

Una Pizza Napoletana does almost nothing a top-rated delivery spot does. It opens Thursday, Friday and Saturday at five, takes its last reservation at 9:45, and books only through OpenTable, two weeks out, where the slots go in minutes. Parties top out at four. Every guest with a reservation gets one pizza. Anthony Mangieri, the chef and owner, makes all the dough himself every morning, by hand, in limited quantity: Italian flour, natural leavening, no commercial yeast, a thirty-hour dough. The restaurant does not open unless he is in the building. The guide's entry describes a short list of pizzas on a dough it calls soft and airy, with produce from the Union Square market. Christina Tobia Mangieri runs the dining room. Time Out, writing up the World list in September, credited his “uncompromising 30-year devotion to his craft” and noted that for thirty years the place has done pizza and nothing else.

By every measure a slice line uses, it is the least New York pizzeria in New York: no slices, no walk-ins at dinner, no second pie, no delivery. By the only measure the Italian judges use, it is the best in the country and second in the world, behind Napoli on the Road in London and ahead of every pizzeria in Naples.

Here is the list the closing slide promised, straight from 50toppizza.it, ranks as printed. The guide allows ties, so the fifty positions hold more than fifty names.

1. Una Pizza Napoletana, 175 Orchard Street, Lower East Side. First in the country, second in the world.

6. Don Antonio, 309 West 50th Street, Hell's Kitchen. Giorgia Caporuscio's wood-fired Neapolitan; 30th on the World list.

8. Ribalta, 48 East 12th Street, off Union Square. Tied with Robert's of Chicago; 35th in the world.

13. Stretch Pizza, 320 Kent Avenue, Williamsburg, in Domino Park. Wylie Dufresne and Gadi Peleg's New York-style pies, by the slice and whole; the guide's One to Watch for 2026.

14. Audace, 365 Park Avenue South. Neapolitan, with the guide's Best Cocktail List award.

15. Pizza Secret, 72 Fifth Avenue, Park Slope. Tied with Pasquale's of Rhode Island; the guide's Best Fried Food award.

17. Ops, 346 Himrod Street, Bushwick. Naturally leavened, wood-fired.

21. Kesté, 77 Fulton Street, Financial District. Roberto Caporuscio's Neapolitan, now downtown.

32. Salsa, 40 Clifford Place, Greenpoint. Counter-service Neapolitan.

36. Andrew Bellucci's Pizzeria, 37-08 30th Avenue, Astoria. The guide's New Entry of the Year.

39. Pasquale Jones, 187 Mulberry Street, Nolita. Wood-fired, with a serious wine list.

Six in Manhattan, four in Brooklyn, one in Queens. The Bronx and Staten Island have none. Elsewhere in the state, Jay's in Kenmore, outside Buffalo, sits at 7 and Pizzeria Florian in East Aurora at 40. Across the river, Razza in Jersey City is third in the country, tenth in the world and the guide's Performance of the Year; Bricco in Haddon Township is 31. Long Island, which produced the only downstate winner on Monday's list, has no entry on this one; its one appearance is Taglio in Mineola, fifth on the guide's separate slice ranking. By Time Out's count, 22 United States pizzerias made the World list, four of them in the top ten. No other American city put more than three on the fifty.

Now the absences, the part that gets screenshotted. Not on the fifty: Joe's. Prince Street. Di Fara. L&B Spumoni Gardens. Lucali. John's of Bleecker Street. Lombardi's, which calls itself the first pizzeria in America. Roberta's. L'industrie, the shop with the longest line in Williamsburg. Not one coal oven. Not one gas-deck slice shop. Not a single square.

Two of them live on the guide's other list. 50 Top Pizza runs a separate slice ranking, and that one reads like a New Yorker wrote it: L'industrie first in the country, Mama's TOO! fourth, Brooklyn D.O.P. sixth, Filaga eighth, Mano's in Ridgewood eleventh, Cello's fourteenth, Roberta's R Slice fifteenth. The slice list is the guide's way of saying it knows exactly what a New York slice is and has decided it is a different sport. Joe's, Di Fara, Lucali, L&B and John's are on neither list. Nothing about their ovens changed this year; the jury's definition never included them.

New Haven's claim rests on three coal ovens: Frank Pepe's, Sally's and Modern, thin and charred at the edge, the style the city spells apizza. None of the three is on the fifty. The one New Haven entry is Zeneli, a Neapolitan pizzeria at 138 Wooster Street, the same street as Pepe's at 157 and Sally's at 237. It ranked 34th, below Bricco in New Jersey and above Posto in Somerville, Massachusetts. Nothing else in Connecticut made it.

The list says less about Pepe's than about what the jury counts as pizza. A panel that scores a soft, wood-fired Neapolitan dough was never going to rank a coal-oven apizza, the same way it did not rank Di Fara or L&B. New Haven's self-image survives the list fine. What does not survive is the idea that there is one scoreboard. There are two, at least, and they measure different things, and this week the city sat at the bottom of one and the top of the other.

So, Monday's open question, answered. The crowd gave the five boroughs zero. The judges gave them eleven and the top spot. Each list is right about what it measures, which is unsatisfying, so here is the side we take. The delivery-app list measures a pizza twenty-five minutes after it left the oven, in a cardboard box, scored by someone on a couch who never met the person who made it. It is a real measurement of a real product, and the product is a box. The Italian list measures the thing itself, at the table, hot, by someone who paid for it without a name tag and ate it in the building. That is the pizza. The people who make pizza in this city, the ones who mix dough before dawn and stand at a 900-degree oven all night, are judged on the second list, and eleven of them just made it, more than any other city in America. The couch can keep its forty. The oven took the fifty.

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