5 pizza styles and top spots to find them in Las Vegas

Las Vegas hasn’t traditionally been known as a pizza town, or at least a town with a distinctive pizza style like New York or Chicago. What Vegas has become is a pizza town of another sort, one offering a profusion of regional and global pizza styles, along with specialty pies and very Vegas abundance, such as 15-inch slices and pies measuring 20 square feet.

Perhaps it is this diversity, rather than a single mode of pizza-making, that defines the Vegas life of pie. Certainly, it’s no accident that the International Pizza Expo, the world’s largest pizza trade show, has been held here for decades, or that the annual Las Vegas Pizza Festival (vegaspizzafest.com), one of the city’s most popular food events, returns Nov. 15 with more than 20 purveyors representing almost 10 pizza styles.

With the festival just ahead, we’re taking this occasion to share five different expressions of crust, sauce and toppings from five Vegas pizza paragons.

Chicago deep dish

Tony Cimino and Ashleigh Hughes, a young couple with Chicago roots and families in the restaurant business, opened Tony’s Pizzeria in late August in Pawn Plaza in downtown Vegas. The menu leads with deep dish pies: a crust sturdy enough to support thick layers of sauce, meat and cheese, but still soft without being bready, the cornice imparting a gently crisp crunch and a flavorful char.

The circular deep dish is sliced into thick wedges, so no folding here. You’ll need a fork or a big bite to tackle them. Tony’s also serves a stuffed pizza, a cousin of deep dish in which a top layer of dough encases the fillings, with the sauce swiped across before baking.

Tony’s Pizzeria, 725 Las Vegas Blvd. South, Suite 140

New York style

Giuseppe “Joey” Scolaro, one of the family owners of Lucino’s, takes New York-style fundamentals — hand-tossed dough, deck ovens, a gently chewy crust that is crisp on bottom but still allows slices to be folded in half — and puts a house spin on them.

A thicker cornice than some New York-style pies encloses soppressata, salami, pepperoni, capicola, hot Italian sausage and hits of cherry pepper relish for a Wiseguy Pizza, or pepperoni, mozzarella, Pecorino-Romano, ricotta and a flurry of fresh basil for an Upside Down version. Vodka pasta sauce and chicken Parm, two fine olds standards, meet atop a Vodka Chicken Parm pizza with “blotches of sauce.”

Lucino’s also knows its way around a Philly cheesesteak.

Lucino’s, 3035 E. Tropicana Ave.

Detroit style

The flagship pie of the Motor City draws on the focaccia-like dough of Sicilian pizza, but the essential ingredient is the pan. According to Detroit folklore, the first Detroit pizzas were baked at a local bar in the mid-1940s in forged-steel pans once used to hold spare parts at an auto plant. The pans helped create the proper crust, fluffy but with a crunchy exterior.

The Meatsa Meatsa at Red Dwarf features pepperoni, sausage and brown sugar-glazed ham beneath a coverlet of cheese spread to the edges of the rectangular pan; the sauce goes on top. The cheese crisps up along the edges, also contributing to the ideal texture. The best part of a Detroit pizza? The corner piece, crunchy and crisp.

Red Dwarf, 1305 E. Vegas Valley Drive

Neapolitan

In Naples, the birthplace of pizza, the pie is at once pleasure and bureaucracy, heritage and stricture. The Neapolitan pizza association regulates what constitutes a true Neapolitan pie, including specific ingredients, dough handling, cooking temperatures and the maximum diameter of a finished pizza.

The guidelines help produce what the menu at Settebello Pizzeria Napoletana calls the “distinctive characteristics” of Neapolitan pizza. “It is not crispy. It is elastic, soft and foldable.” Roasty char spots spatter the crust, a sign the pizza was “correctly cooked in a blistering hot wood-burning oven.”

A classic Margherita embodies the Neapolitan pizza art: crushed tomatoes, puddles of mozzarella, Parmesan, olive oil and a gust of fresh basil.

Settebello Pizzeria Napoletana, 9350 W. Sahara Ave., Suite 170

Sicilian

Vegas pizza history comes full circle: The original Good Pie opened in 2018 in the same Pawn Plaza suite that now houses Tony’s Pizzeria and its Chicago deep dish pies. Good Pie reflects the larger diversity of Vegas pizza in the scope of the styles it offers: Sicilian, Detroit, New York-style, grandma, gluten-free and more.

Let us take Sicilian as a characteristic (and very popular) specimen. Sicilian pizza in the U.S. descends from sfincione, the focaccia-like street pizza brought here from Sicily by immigrants. At Good Pie, rectangular Sicilian pies are fashioned using the traditional thick, soft, airy crust with a crisp oiled bottom. The crust might support vegetarian toppings or a quartet of meats (pepperoni, meatball, ham, sausage) or curled cup pepperoni dotted with ricotta florets.

Good Pie, 1212 S. Main St.; 835 Seven Hill Drive, Suites 140 A and B, Henderson

Contact Johnathan L. Wright at jwright@reviewjournal.com. Follow @JLWTaste on Instagram.