25 Best Sausage Pizzas In America

This modern Italian restaurant also operates as a New York slice shop through its side entrance, and chef Angelo Romano (who's also manned the pizza oven at Brooklyn landmark Roberta's) focuses on using the finest ingredients possible to create his pizzas, including organic flour. The small pies emerge from the pizza oven slightly charred and bubbling; The sausage pie, topped with tomato sauce, pickled cherry peppers, mozzarella, pecorino, and big chunks of fresh house-made sausage, is the one to order.

&pizza, with 13 locations in the Washington, D.C. area and one more in the works,  is DC's smoking-hot Italian answer to Chipotle: Customers can create their own pizzas choosing from three doughs, eight sauces, three cheeses, any combination of meat and/or vegetables, and toppings like capers and red pepper chile oil. But if you prefer to place your pizza in their (very capable) hands, we suggest you opt for the Farmer's Daughter, which is made with spicy tomato sauce, spinach, fresh mozzarella, classic fennel Italian sausage, local farm eggs, red pepper chile oil, and Parmigiano-Reggiano. It's a beauty. 

In a city dedicated to deep-dish pies, this family-owned restaurant has been serving up thin-crust pizzas to Chicago residents for decades, and as the note on their website demonstrates ("If you don't know about us, you will"), the owners are fairly confident in their popularity. The thin-crust, tasty sausage, and generous cheese and sauce covering will likely leave you in agreement.

"In 1956, Vito and Anna Falco came to America with only their family and a dream" notes the restaurant's website. "By 1964 their dream became reality when they opened the original Falco's Pizzeria on the south side at 87th and Washtenau." Heartwarming, right? But also delicious. At Falco's, the pizza is made with the restaurant's unique sauce and hand-rolled crust and loaded with cheese and toppings. While the pizza place is known for its thin crust sausage pizza, customers can mix and match with crusts of double dough and Garlic Italiano Crust and toppings including pineapple, garlic, jalapeno, and anchovies to name just a few.

There are styles of pizza so particular to the area they're from that many outsiders will forever struggle to comprehend the reason for their existence. For New Yorkers that's Chicago deep-dish, for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, apparently that's St. Louis-style. Not long ago he had St. Louis native and Mad Men star Jon Hamm on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, during which he told Hamm that Imo's was terrible, a "terrible, terrible pizza place." Hamm defended the pizza, noting that the middle slice is the best one, and saying you could "taste the Gateway Arch" and its 11 World Series titles in an Imo's slice (square cut, of course) and going so far as to say he'd take Imo's over Kimmel's own. If you haven't tasted it for yourself, you'll need to before weighing in. While its thin and unleavened crackery crust is almost like one you'll find in a bar pie, it's generally known to be a bit sweeter than typical bar pies, and meant more than anything else to act as a vehicle for the unique cheese topping that makes St. Louis style unlike any other slice you'll have ever tried.

This thin crust bar pie institution in Stamford, Conn., has long been notorious for its no-frills demeanor, no-special-options policy, and for not making exceptions. There are signs, though, that this reputation may be thawing. Consider first the special Corned Beef and Cabbage Pizza for St. Patrick's Day. That makes sense when you consider "Colony" was the nickname of the Irish neighborhood in Stamford where Colony Grill was established by Irish owners in 1935. But now there are three locations, and they're even doing a salad pizza. Go figure. What you're going to want to do though is order the sausage pie with hot oil (chile-pepper infused oil) and a "stinger" pie (they're thin so you're going to need two). That signature hot oil is a must — if you don't do it, don't bother going. There's almost the same amount of tasty sauce and cheese as there is crisp cracker crust. There's something really special about the equal amounts of ingredients you likely won't have had before, the pockmarked surface resembles some crazy dream where cheese covers the surface of the moon (all melty like you remember from the orange-oil covered slice at the favorite pizza place from your youth), and the sting of the oil brings you right back to the beer you'll want to sip while savoring each bite.

Good pizza in Dallas? Are you kidding? Nope. Cane Rosso owner Jay Jerrier is serving some bar-raising Vera Pizza Napoletana-certified stuff. As the menu declares, by highlighting just four ingredients — sea salt, water, yeast, and imported double-zero flour — great pizza can be all about simplicity.

You'll want to order the Zoli with sausage, hot soppressata, hand-crushed San Marzano tomatoes, house-made mozzarella, and basil, and you'll enjoy it for sure. Just mind your wallet. Cane Rosso will serve vegan cheese, but they draw the line at topping your pizza with ranch dressing — you can incur a $1,000 charge for demanding a side of it (it's a joke... but don't try it anyway, just in case, OK?). 

Frank Pepe, Sally's Apizza, Modern Apizza, and Bar and the Bru Room round out New Haven's big four pizza names, but there are great, lesser-known pizzerias, one on the other side of I-95 in West Haven that has been around almost as long: Zuppardi's, open since 1934 (though they may be ahead of the others in terms of entering the twenty-first century in one way at least: they launched a food truck this year). The origins? Domenico and Angelina Zuppardi's bakery, which was passed down to Tony and Frances Zuppardi, and in the 1940s was turned into a pizzeria by Tony (who was a baker in the Navy) when Domenico became ill.

Zuppardi's has its own take on Connecticut's renowned thin-crust style (they call it "a Napolitano-style pie") and a philosophy handed down to co-owner Lori Zuppardi (read the full interview) from her father that goes like this: "The last bite has to be as good as the first when people eat our pizza." It's as thin as, but less crisp than, New Haven's other pies, with a New York City crust that's lighter and airier than the ones you'll find in Gotham. The difference is in the edge, which is charred in places, and is thicker all around.

The signature is the Special: mozzarella, mushroom, sausage, and marinara. But there are two other pies worth noting: the market price, freshly shucked littleneck clam pie (there's a cheaper and quicker clam pie, but why would you want that?) and a wet and juicy escarole and bean white pie, with garlic and bites of crisp and wet escarole and soft bean interspersed. All good Italians know that escarole and bean soup is a great winter savior. Here, you'll find it on a pie. Prego!

You'd expect no less than pizza greatness from Seattle star chef and James Beard Award winner Tom Douglas, and at his three Serious Pie spots in Seattle (Virginia, Westlake, Pike) that's exactly what you get. These are thin-crust, oblong pizzas about a foot long and imbued with serious soul (there are also huge corniciones).

Consider the pizza mission statement that greets you when visiting their website: "Serious Pie: a pizzeria with a bread baker's soul, serves up pies with blistered crusts, light textured but with just enough structure and bite. Our attentiveness to each pizza in the 600°F stone-encased applewood burning oven preserves the character of housemade charcuterie and artisan cheeses from around the world."

The menu features seven pies with toppings like Yukon gold potato, soft-cooked free-range eggs, smoked prosciutto, truffle cheese, snap peas, StraCapra (a washed-rind semi-soft goat cheese), and clams, but you'll want to try the sweet fennel sausage, roasted pepper, and provolone pie that was voted one of the top 50 pizzas in the country this year.

The local favorite (Usher's too, apparently) has already seen its fair share of fame after winning various best-of-Boston pizza lists over the years. Santarpio's, which opened in 1903, sticks to their traditional roots when it comes to the infamous slightly chewy and satisfyingly wet slices. Their menu consists of a variety of options, but includes a list of customers' favorite combos, like a pie that pairs sausage with garlic, ground beef, and onions, and even "The Works": mushrooms, onions, peppers, garlic, sausage, pepperoni, extra cheese, and anchovies. First-timer? Order Santarpio's most popular pie — mozzarella, sausage, and garlic — to establish a baseline.

San Francisco's Mission has changed over the past decade, but Mission visionaries and Pizzeria Delfina owners Craig and Anne Stoll haven't lost a step even as they've expanded. The menu is inspired by Craig's memories of the New York-style pies from his youth and pizza from Naples' best pizzerias. The menu features eight "Neapolitan-inspired" thin-crust pies and two daily-changing specials. You'll be intrigued by options like the Panna (tomato sauce, cream, basil, and Parmigiano-Reggiano), and look out! A cherrystone clam pie with tomato, oregano, and hot peppers. But your first move should be the Salsiccia: house-made fennel sausage, tomato, bell pepper, onion, and mozzarella.

Pequod's originator Burt Katz moved on from this endeavor after few years to take a break before opening a new pizza stalwart in 1989: Burt's Place (now closed) in Morton Grove, just north ofChicago. But the years have been kind to his legacy. Pequod's deep dish, known for its "caramelized crust," earns points for its chewy, crusty, quasi-burnt cheese crust that forms the outer edge of this cheesy casserole, adding a welcome degree of texture that probably wouldn't be necessary if it weren't nearly an inch thick. But it is necessary. And beautiful. And it does add that texture. And you can thank the fact that they spread a thin layer of cheese along the outer part of the crust where it darkens against the side of the pan.  

You hear people's tales of outer-borough travels to Di Fara in Brooklyn, but the Bronx deserves its own pizza paean, and Louie and Ernie's is up to the task of making this borough the pizza destination it deserves to be recognized as (according to The New York Times, it actually started out in East Harlem in 1947 but moved to its current location in 1959).

Consider that just a few years ago, Adam Kuban wrote on the pizza blog, Slice, that the sausage and onion pie at Louie and Ernie's is "the pizza to haunt your dreams." He was right. It's that can't-wait-for-it-to-cool, burn-the-roof-of-your-mouth-it's-worth-it good. The sausage (made with 80-year-old recipes) comes from the S&D Pork Store four blocks down Crosby Avenue, and is applied in generous, juicy, fennel-spiked chunks barely held in place by copious amounts of melted cheese.

The only thing stopping this place from becoming a national destination is its location in the deep Bronx. No matter. Thanks to Cosimo and Johnny Tiso, who bought the place from Ernie Ottuso in 1987 (and who sell restaurant T-shirts for $5 a pop — when was the last time you saw that?) Louie & Ernie's keeps turning out amazing pies to the locals who know they have a good thing.