DeLucia’s Brick Oven Pizza

DeLucia’s Brick Oven Pizza (Raritan, NJ) - Peter Regas (@pizzahistorybook) will tell you the first US pizzerias began in the 1890s - starting with street vendors and moving on to brick-and-mortar shops (generally out of bakeries). Founded in 1917, DeLucia’s is part of that wave of early coal oven bakery pizzerias. A century + a decade later, the heart of the operation remains its ancient monster of a brick oven.

On my first visit, they were nice enough to let me step into the kitchen to see that oven up close and explain how it works. The oven no longer uses coal. Instead, every morning, the crew fires it with a powerful gas burner (which you might classify as a massive blowtorch) until the bricks are thoroughly heat-soaked. They turn off the burner, and for the rest of the day, each pie bakes in the steady radiant heat stored in the brick rather than over an active flame …which is pretty awesome.

That steady heat results in a crust that is uniformly baked. The bottom develops a crisp, well-baked undercarriage, without the leopard-spotted blistering of some pizzas.

The crust itself is exceptionally thin with very little cornicione (rim). It is noticeably thinner than the New York-Neapolitan hybrid style found at many early American pizzerias, feeling almost like a grandfather of the tavern pizza tradition. It has a crisp exterior and pleasantly chewy interior. Despite its thinness, the crust has enough strength to support the toppings without folding. It is a restrained style of pizza (“sophisticatedly simple”). We tried a tomato pie (this is Jersey after all) and a sausage and broccoli pie (this is America after all). Both were quite enjoyable.

In recent years, @deluciasbrickovenpizza has developed a lot of online popularity. You need to plan to order early, or else you may leave with a pizza-less belly. But the real attraction isn’t scarcity - it’s continuity. More than a century after it opened, the same ancient oven is still turning heat stored in thousands of pounds of brick into remarkably good pizza. Trends come and go, but there aren’t many better stories - or historic pizza experiences.