Pizza Culture in Albany, New York

Pizza in Albany means the slice shop. The pizzerias that come up again and again in local coverage are independent, often family-run places selling big, round New York-style pies whole or by the slice, from the Lark Street neighborhood out to Troy, Schenectady, Saratoga Springs and the suburbs in between.

None of the coverage we drew on describes a distinct “Albany style,” the way New Haven has apizza. The region’s pizza identity lives in individual shops and in long-running arguments about them. The most detailed public record of those arguments is a blog contest that ended in 2014.

This journal also has a personal reason to pay attention: the web address you are reading once belonged to a Northern Boulevard pizzeria that closed in 2023. That story, and the fact that we have no connection to the shop, is told plainly below.

What “Albany pizza” usually means

A Capital Region pizzeria menu will look familiar to anyone from New York City: large round pies, a plain cheese pie as the baseline, slices sold at the counter and a long list of toppings. That template grew out of the same Italian-American slice-shop tradition traced in our history of New York-style pizza.

Inside that template there is real range. AOA’s judging notes keep circling the same questions: sauce that leans sweet versus sauce that tastes bright and tomatoey, a thin, crisp crust versus a thicker, chewier one, and how much char a pie should carry.

Ovens differ, too. DeFazio’s of Troy, one of the tournament’s most successful shops, was baking in a wood-fired oven when AOA profiled it in 2013, a setup closer to Naples than to the gas deck oven of a classic slice shop. We lay out that split in New York vs. Neapolitan pizza.

All Over Albany’s Tournament of Pizza

All Over Albany (AOA) was a Capital Region website that published for a decade before signing off at the end of 2018. It ran seven editions of its Tournament of Pizza, the last in 2014, and the 2014 tournament archive is still online.

The format was more careful than a reader poll. In the early rounds, shops were grouped by area (Albany, Schenectady, Troy, Saratoga), the same type of pie was ordered anonymously from each, and a panel of four or five judges tasted them blind, side by side. Each judge scored crust, sauce and toppings out of 5 points apiece and overall taste out of 10, and the totals were scaled to 100.

The 2014 edition changed one rule: first-round judging moved into the shops and was no longer blind. By early October 2014, AOA counted 174 pizzas scored across six years of what it called the modern 100-point era.

The champions from 2010 through 2014 were Marino’s of Schenectady (2010), 5th and 50 of Scotia (2011), Marisa’s Place of Guilderland (2012) and DeFazio’s of Troy (2013 and 2014). DeFazio’s was runner-up three years running, 2010 through 2012, before it finally won.

The 2014 tournament, billed as the last, pitted the four past champions still in business against four shops that had come close. Its final, on October 11 at Shmaltz Brewing in Clifton Park, was the first open to the public, and more than 100 people came to taste the four finalist pizzas.

DeFazio’s won with a vegetable pie of smoked mozzarella, red peppers, red onions, tomatoes and basil that set the tournament’s record for a single pizza. Marino’s took the crowd-voted People’s Choice Plate with sausage, meatballs and pepperoni. AOA noted that the two shops held the highest all-time averages in tournament history and called both family-owned.

Albany’s own contenders

Albany proper had its run in 2013. DC’s, a first-time entrant across the street from the University at Albany’s uptown campus, won its first-round Albany pool with a sausage pie. It then upset reigning champion Marisa’s Place and reached the final. There it entered a plain sausage pie, made with sausage the shop made in house, and lost to DeFazio’s.

That Albany pool also included two Lark Street-area shops, Dino’s and Soho, plus Andriano’s of Delmar.

DeFazio’s and the bread-dough crust

AOA’s archive tells DeFazio’s story in the most detail. When AOA delivered the Fourth Street shop its first tournament trophy in December 2013, owner Rocco DeFazio, who inherited the business from his parents, said the crust starts from his grandmother’s Italian bread recipe, not a pizza-dough formula. “Really good dough should taste like good Italian bread,” he told AOA.

He said that dough was built for the wood-fired oven he had bought from Italy about 30 years earlier, when few American pizzerias used one, and that his parents had a wood-fired oven in Italy. The shop then offered seven crusts, including whole wheat and multigrain.

Put a pie like that next to one from a gas-oven slice shop and “New York-style” in the Capital Region starts to look like a family resemblance, not a rulebook. Two shops a few miles apart can turn out very different pizza, and plenty of local loyalty comes down to which version someone grew up eating.

One name, several shops: I Love NY Pizza

The name I Love NY Pizza has hung over more than one Capital Region counter, usually followed by a place: of Schenectady, of Northern Blvd. The phrase borrows New York State’s tourism slogan, which dates to a 1977 campaign.

AOA’s archive records two of these shops in competition. An “I Love” shop on Fourth Street in Troy, a two-time semifinalist, faced its neighbor DeFazio’s in 2012 and again in 2014. I Love NY Pizza of Schenectady entered the Schenectady pool in 2013.

When the Northern Boulevard shop closed in 2023, a JAMZ 96.3 write-up said the closing was not expected to affect “the other I Love NY shops,” without naming them or saying how they were related.

We could not find any public source explaining how these shops relate to one another: whether they share owners, recipes, suppliers or only a name. So we treat each as its own business, and readers should too. A great slice at one tells you nothing certain about another.

The Northern Boulevard shop and this website

I Love NY Pizza of Northern Blvd operated at 336 Northern Boulevard, in Albany’s Loudon Plaza. A notice on its website thanked customers for 17 years and said it would close permanently on Friday, August 11, 2023.

Its owner told News10 that the business had been hard to keep going since the pandemic, with prices for his supplies rising, and that he had no plans to reopen. Daily Voice reported the closing a week after the last day, quoting the same farewell notice.

That shop’s web address is now the home of Northern Blvd Food Journal, so it is worth being exact about what that means. This journal is an independent food magazine. It is not the pizzeria, has no connection to the pizzeria’s former owners, and does not cook, sell or deliver food.

There is no menu, ordering or phone number here. If you arrived looking for the shop, it is closed. More about who we are is on our About page.

Openings and closings: the map keeps moving

Any list of Capital Region pizzerias starts going stale the day it is published. Three examples from local reporting:

• Little Anthony’s, Albany: announced in January 2022 that it was closing for good after 34 years. The shop had gone meatless the previous September as a vegetarian and vegan pizzeria. Its third-generation owner said he had found a buyer, but the building’s owners, who are family members, refused to lease to that buyer or any other, WGNA reported.
• I Love NY Pizza of Northern Blvd, Albany: closed August 11, 2023, after 17 years.
• Blaze Pizza, Balltown Road, Schenectady area: the fast-casual chain’s first Capital Region location, opened at Mohawk Commons in 2015, had closed after a ten-year run, WGNA reported in late September 2025. The chain’s Clifton Park and Albany locations were still open at the time.

The same caution applies to every shop named in this article. AOA’s results end in 2014, and as of October 2026 we have not confirmed that each of those pizzerias is still operating at the same address under the same ownership. Check current hours before you cross the county for a slice.

How to taste your way through Capital Region pizza

AOA’s method is worth borrowing, because it was built to be fair to the shops.

• Order the same pie everywhere. AOA ordered the same type of pizza from every shop in a round, often sausage. A plain cheese pie is an even cleaner test, since there is nothing to hide behind. Our classic New York cheese pizza recipe gives you a baseline to compare against at home.
• Eat it fresh. In 2014, a few AOA judges said one sausage pie would probably have been better right out of the oven. If you are comparing, eat at the counter or close to it.
• Score the parts. Crust, sauce, toppings, then the whole. Splitting it up makes it easier to say why one slice beats another.
• Look past the sign. A shared name, including I Love NY Pizza, tells you little. What a good neighborhood pizzeria does day to day is a better guide.

AOA’s last tournament wrapped up in October 2014. The arguments it scored are still going at counters across the region.