The Unique Connecticut Seafood Pizza You Won't Find Anywhere Else

When we talk about regional pizza styles, it's easy to reduce everything to a battle between the thin, floppy, best-in-the-world New York slices and the casserole-esque, deep dish Chicago pizzas. (Never mind the fact that even Chicago doesn't regularly consume deep-dish pizza.) But we shouldn't neglect other regional pizza styles, such as New Haven's thin, distinctively-shaped white clam pies, which are exactly what they sound like.

There are a few things you need to know about New Haven pizza in general. First, it's neither circular nor rectangular, but a curious thin-crust oblong; second, it's not called pizza, but apizza, pronounced "ah-beets." Most New Haven pies are pretty sauce-heavy (often called "tomato pies"), but white clam pizza, as the name indicates, has no sauce at all; it's a more cheese and seafood-forward experience. It should come as no surprise that a New England state knows its way around a fun regional seafood dish or two, but even Rhode Island, with its clam stuffies, never thought to put those delicious bivalves on pizza.

Back in the early 20th century, New Haven was home to many Italian-Americans starting a new like in America, just like, well, pretty much every other major city east of the Mississippi. One of the immigrants who called New Haven home was Frank Pepe, an illiterate baker who, in 1925, began to sell apizzas alongside his wife Filomena. His was the earliest example of New Haven-style apizza, although the white clam apizza didn't come along until the 1960s, when a change in health regulations made it so Pepe couldn't sell clams on the half shell anymore. Instead, he placed them atop a pizza, where they were an instant hit.

Today, Pepe's has 19 different locations, most of them in Connecticut but some of them in places as far-flung as Virginia and Florida. If you're in New Haven and want to try other exemplars of white clam apizza, you could always hit up Modern Apizza (which opened in 1944 despite the name), Sal's Apizza (which was actually opened by Frank Pepe's disgruntled nephew in 1938 and started a rivalry that persists to this day), or Sally's Apizza (which has no relationship to Sal's despite the similar name).