Brooklyn is the true homeland of pizza. It offers the broadest range of styles, fuels, and toppings, and in Brooklyn, one can still be astonished by a pizza, as I recently was at the rather grand-looking, but little known, La Villa Pizzeria in Park Slope, where I encountered a stuffed-crust pie from Abruzzo. It was a stuffed crust pie but not like the ones at Domino’s. When it arrived at the table, it was rectangular and had achieved a beautiful shade of brown on the top crust, with a bottom crust twice as thick, nicely charred underneath here and there. The pie was sealed on the sides, boxing the ingredients, and when cut into 10 square pieces, the cheese seductively oozed out.

F&F, where the entire space boasts the caramelized aroma of faintly burnt cheese, reinterprets classic New York pizza. The offerings include “regular” cheese and tomato slices, both cut into squares from larger Neapolitan pies, and square Sicilian slices. And that’s about it for now. Scarr’s on the Lower East Side and Paulie Gee’s in Greenpoint follow this same neo-nostalgic path, to stellar results. 2 early visits suggest that F&F, which finishes its slices with good sea salt and olive oil, is well on its way to keeping up with its ambitious peers.

At Norm’s, it’s all about the cheeses. There are 4 of them — ricotta, of course, as well as Grana Padano, and both low-moisture and fresh mozzarella — as well as garlic, lemon zest, and Franks’ Green Gold olive oil. The only real outlier on the regular menu is the spicy vodka, given heat by Calabrian chilies.

Just when you thought you knew everything there is to know about the current craze for focaccia and all its pizzalike variants, along comes focaccia di Recco: a bubbly ooze of tart and fruity stracchino cheese barely contained by 2 supersize rounds of paper-thin dough. To make focaccia di Recco, you take a simple ball of unleavened dough larded with olive oil, divide it in 2, then roll and stretch the doughballs until you can read a newspaper through them. Then you line a pan with one of the dough rounds, top it with scoops of cheese, cover and seal it with the second round of dough like an apple pie, drizzle with more olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt, and bake for ~10 minutes.

East Village restaurant Violet does a good job at representing the grilled pizza of Rhode Island — although some pies may be a little too similar to the ones found at Al Forno, the restaurant from which chef Matt Hyland (Emily, Emmy Squared) pulls inspiration

When Roberta’s first opened, it seemed like the kind of lark that might not last. A few dudes— Chris Parachini, Brandon Hoy, and Carlo Mirarchi— built out much of the wood-fired pizzeria by hand, and opened even without working gas (they used butane burners for the first year.) But along with perfectly charred, soft, chewy pies with charming names like Beastmaster, they also managed to do fried chicken and fresh greens surprisingly well for a bunch of hipsters.

Nearly 10 years later, it’s still worth the pilgrimage. Aside from some veggie-forward options on the menu—former chef de cuisine Nick Barker is to thank for an ever-so-slight shift to a lighter, California style of cooking—there have been no fancy updates to the restaurant, which you enter through a stickered, graffitied red vestibule.

While Paulie Gee’s serves the Neapolitanish, toppings-eccentric pies that were all the rage when it opened in 2010, Giannone has more than pizza up his sleeve. For his second act, he’s going old-school with Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop. He and his head pizza chef Andrew Brown, a 4-year alum of Paulie Gee’s, are taking inspiration in slices from these places. Take the Freddy Prince, an upside-down Sicilian with fresh mozzarella that nods to Giannone’s favorite square, Prince Street’s Soho Square. “It’s a combo of that and one from this place in Whitestone called Freddy’s, where they have sesame seeds on the bottom of their crust.

Bocce, where diners can play games of bocce and also eat pizza and share plates. The pizzas come from executive chef Tim Meyers and pizza consultant Anthony Falco, who both used to work at Roberta’s. “They can’t replicate Roberta’s wood-burning brick ovens on Bocce’s electric grill, but are still pretty tasty”. But he was particularly surprised by the share plates, like the calamari-and-shrimp fritto misto, which “was perfectly battered and succulent.”

East Village’s 5-month-old pizza restaurant Mani in Pasta from chef-owner Giuseppe Manco is apparently already a hit. Manco spent the first part of his career making Neapolitan-style pizzas in Italy and the US before switching to Roman-style pizzas, which he’s now considered a specialist in. Critics at Grub Street note that his pan pizzas are “terrific,” highlighting the margherita and carbonara versions in particular. The restaurant also serves up Roman pastas and pinsa, flatbreads made with the same dough as the pizzas but pressed thinner.