While large rectangular pizzas aren’t entirely unique to the Binghamton area, they are a big part of our local cuisine. One of the most popular sheet pizza places is Brozzettis, which is a love it or leave it kind of place, and most outsiders refuse to even acknowledge it as pizza due to their use of american cheese. A lot of places around here use american cheese in their pizzas, something that the sheet pizza makers adapted from the earliest pizzas in our area, which were hot pies. A lot of hot pie places like Red’s Kettle Inn and The Oasis in Johnson City used only american cheese for their pies, but along the way new restaurants started mixing it with provolone and mozzarella cheeses and topped it on a thicker doughy crust to create the pizzas the locals know and love today. I’m not sure about the history of all of these places, but I feel like most of them took off selling pizzas in the 60’s or 70s, which is 20 to 30 years after pizza was originally introduced to our area (although that is definitely debatable).
Of course I wasn’t able to include every place in the area that serves a sheet style pizza, but I did choose the ones that are the most popular and most notable. I’m going to start with my least favorite and then finish off the blog with the place I think is best. If you’re reading this and you’ve never had a sheet pizza before, please, throw all your preconceptions of pizza out the window and enjoy this style of pizza for what it is, doughy, saucy, sweet (for the most part), and rectangular .
7) Jim Roma’s Bakery- Nanticoke Ave, Endicott
What’s great about most sheet pizza places is that they offer a half sheet, which is usually 12 slices. That’s what I decided to go with here and with a lot of the other places too. Most places use smaller pans for their half sheet pizzas, but not at Jim Roma’s, when you order a half sheet pizza they cook a full sheet and then cut it in half and give it to you in a smaller box, sealed with wax paper on the top (Vestal bakery used to do their pizzas like that as well, but I’m glad they stopped). Another unique thing about Jim Roma’s is that they cut their pizza slices with scissors. I ordered this pizza with extra sauce and extra cheese, and it was by far the messiest pizza on the list. See the burnt cheese in the pictures? That’s from the american cheese they use in their cheese blend, and american cheese actually tastes better when it’s a little burnt like this. I’ve ordered extra cheese here before and it was good, but this time I thought it was too sweet, they must have had more american in the mix than usual. The extra sauce was a nice touch though, it was semi-sweet and not overly seasoned (most of the sauces in this pizza blog are similar in that aspect). My least favorite thing about this pizza is the crust. This is a very bready pizza, which is why I ordered the extra sauce and cheese, it needs more flavor, just look at the bread to sauce and cheese radio in the 2nd picture. The crust doesn’t really have any flavor to it, and while it’s not exactly soft, it’s also not crisp at all and it’s probably the chewiest crust out of all the places I’m going to review. It’s also a little pricier than some of the places, it was $15 for a half sheet with extra sauce and extra cheese, and at other places I get more toppings for that price. I’ve had their sausage and their pepperoni too and I didn’t care for it, so plain is my choice for this place. Expect a half hour wait if ordering in advance, although sometimes if you show up and get lucky they’ll pull a fresh sheet out of the oven and you can take home half or a quarter of it on the spot.
6) DiRienzo’s Bakery- Henry Street, Binghamton
This place is pretty easy to find, just look for the big delivery truck that’s 15 feet in the air in front of the place. This is one of the more unique pizzas on here, it’s not sweet at all. I feel like it has the same flavor profile as Cortese Pizza, it’s on the salty side and I think it’s from their use of Pecorino Romano cheese, as well as the traditional mozzarella. The crust is also unique, it’s the most browned of all the places but not burnt. It’s semi-crisp and it makes me wonder if they don’t use any oil in it. They don’t use much sauce on it, but it still has a pretty strong flavor, aside from the toppings which I thought were a little bland. While it is good, it’s just not a flavor that I find myself craving too often. They’re more famous for their “traditional” pizza, which is just bread with sauce on it, and maybe a little parm sprinkled on top, which is another trait borrowed from certain old school hot pie traditions. While the pizza here isn’t my favorite thing, I do think that they have the best fresh baked bread in the area, their loaves of Italian bread and their Kaiser rolls are not to be missed! Again, this was a half hour wait and roughly $15 for a 12 slice half sheet.
5) Rossi’s Pizza- Oak Hill Endicott
Funny thing about Rossi’s, when I first had it I thought it was a half-assed version of Nirchi’s. Then one night I asked a friend what he thought about it and he said “it’s like Nirchi’s if Nirchi’s was good”. That just proves that everyone has different tastes and opinions on what’s good. He also sent me out to Nineveh one time to try a shitty stromboli that he thought was incredible, so don’t always trust what your friends have to say. This pizza is from the original Rossi’s location out in Endicott. I’ve had pizza from here years ago but I forgot how it was. I’ve never had pizza from the Owego location, but I’ve had it from the JC location, which I thought wasn’t that great. Everyone said that the Endicott location is better, and I think for the most part I’m going to have to agree. I feel like the texture of the crust here at the Endicott one is better than JC, it seemed less dense and it had a buttery flavor similar to Nirchi’s. The cheese to me tasted like straight up mozzarella, but today when I was at the grocery store I checked one of their frozen pizzas and it listed american and provolone cheeses, so I guess they have that in the mix, although it’s hard to tell. While it does taste a lot like Nirchis, it was a little less sweet, and I think that’s because Nirchi’s has a little more american in the mix. I liked the sauce on here too, it was a little brighter than Nirchis. The pepperoni had a great flavor, I would absolutely order that again. The spiedies had a good flavor too but not the best texture. It’s weird, the JC location uses regular full sized spiedies, which I liked, but at the Endicott location they decided to dice them into little cubes. They weren’t really dry but not very moist either. The price was right on par with the other places so far, but on the phone they said it would be a 20 minute wait, 10 minutes less than the other places. I arrived a minute or two late and it still wasn’t ready. As it came out of the oven there was an issue, whoever made the pizza accidentally made it a full sheet instead of the half sheet that I ordered. Not a huge deal, but it took them an extra minute or two to cut it up and Frankenstein it together into the appropriate proportions, and it also meant that I got less crust pieces. That’s the one thing I don’t like about sheet pizzas, the middle pieces. Overall I liked it, but when it comes down to it I’d rather have…
4) Nirchi’s- Taft Ave, Endicott
Most of the time when outsiders are introduced to sheet pizza it’s usually from Nirchi’s, because of their many locations, especially with the Vestal location being so close to SUNY Binghamton and the downtown location being close to student housing and the bus station. For this blog though I decided to try the original location. Unfortunately, I was wrong on which one was the original. I thought it was the one on Taft Ave in Endicott, but it turns out that the original is on Pine Street in Endicott. This was my first time eating at this location, and I gotta say, this was Nirchi’s pizza perfected. If every Nirchi’s location made it this good I would eat there more often. This was the pizza I had most growing up, so I got sick of it after a while, but I definitely get a craving for it every now and then. I could actually probably eat their chicken slices every day of the week, it’s just the traditional red sauce that I get worn out on. The pepperoni here was on the verge of being crisp, and I like a good crisp pepperoni. I loved their old pepperoni that they used to use, it had a good flavor and the edges would get crisp and it would form a little bowl of grease, but they changed it a few years ago. This pepperoni had an ok flavor, but it was a little too salty. That’s my only complaint really. The crust was perfect, it was browned on the bottom but not too crisp, it wasn’t too dense, it was light and semi-soft and had a buttery flavor to it. The red sauce was good, not too sweet, a little tangier that a lot of places on here, but also not too heavy on the seasonings. The cheese was great, very good ratio, it was mostly mozzarella but just enough american thrown in to add creaminess but not enough to make it overly sweet. This worked especially well on the white chicken spiedie pizza. The marinade they used was good, and the chicken was cooked perfectly, very moist and tender. It’s a shame that I don’t live closer to this location! Again, it was about $15 for the pizza, which I think is very fair. It was a 30 minute wait after I ordered it, so I’m thinking it may have been busy for them that day, because usually when I order from another Nirchi’s it’s only a 20 minute wait. If you can’t make it all the way out to this location, the downtown and Vestal locations are usually pretty good, and I had good pizza from the main street location too.
3) Brozzetti’s- Baldwin Street, Johnson City
I love this place, but I only get a craving for it once every few months, where as the next two places on here I could eat every day. It’s also very unique, a lot of people think there’s peanut butter in it, but those people are idiots. A lot of people think the sweetness comes from the sauce, but it doesn’t, it comes from the american cheese, and the crust is also sweet. Years ago I made pizza dough and put honey and brown sugar in it and when the pizza was done the crust tasted like Brozzettis. I’m not saying they put that stuff in their dough, I’m just saying that the dough is where the sweetness comes from. Their dough is also not as thick as a lot of the other places, and it’s a little more dense and chewy. The sauce is minimal but it works out well. Honestly, this pizza I got for the review was a little sub-standard for Brozzettis, but it was still good. They don’t use just american cheese, there’s provolone and mozzarella in it too, but the american cheese flavor is pretty up front. A lot of people say their white garlic pizza is better than the red sauced pizza, but they don’t use fresh garlic on it and I heard from a friend who knows someone that used to work there that the secret to their garlic pizza is that they just put more cheese on it than the regular red sauced pizza. I like both styles, so I usually get half and half. This time I decided to get white pizza with jalapeno and bacon on it. Sounds awesome, right? Well I wasn’t a fan of the bacon they used. It was a little too sweet and ham like, and not crisp at all, and there wasn’t enough of it. The jalapeno was also a little overpowering. The sausage and pepperoni here are both great though, so you should absolutely try those. I don’t remember how much I paid for this, it was a full sheet though. One thing to keep in mind is that you’re better off getting a full sheet from here. It’s 24 slices, and a plain sheet is roughly $20. They have a 10 slice pizza for roughly $10 if you get it plain, but that’s a huge ripoff because the slices are a lot smaller, the 10 slice pizza is pretty much a quarter the size of the full sheet, so you’re better off going big. Another thing to keep in mind, this place is small and take-out only, no tables. I think they do sell slices though if you want to stop in and grab one and go.
2) Pudgies Pizza- Robinson Street, Binghamton
Back in the 80’s and early 90’s Pudgies Pizza reigned supreme. They had many locations in the Binghamton area, and all over upstate NY. They were originally from Elmira, and while I have eaten at the original location before, it no longer exists, and I didn’t want to road trip anyways, so I went to the Robinson street location. Back in the early 90’s they closed all their locations in our area. They were taken over by the short lived Papa G’s and then Nirchi’s took over many of those locations. Then finally, back in the spring of 2009 they opened a Binghamton location again, this time on the east side in a building that used to house Kearnsy’s Pub. I love their pizza, I could seriously inhale this pizza and eat it every day if it wasn’t for the price. Unfortunately, whoever opened this new location knew that Binghamton was nostalgic for it, and therefore willing to spend a little extra on it. For this 32 slice (smaller slices, same size as the 24 slice Brozzettis pizza) sheet pizza with pepperoni on half it came to about $25, and that was with a coupon that took a couple dollars off. Ouch. The pizza was great though. I usually just get plain, but this pepperoni was really good, I liked the flavor and it was a little crisp, so I think that I’m going to keep ordering it from now on. The sauce is great, it’s sweet and a little tangy, and again, not too heavy on the seasoning. The crust is also sweet, but also soft and airy and it has a nice stretch to it. I think the cheese is just straight up mozzarella, but it works very well. They also have round pizzas and within the last year they came out with a half sheet that’s actually a square instead of a rectangle. I usually order that one. If you’ve never had any of the pizzas from this list, this one might be the best way to ease yourself into sheet pizzas, it’s sweet but it lacks american cheese.
- Vestal Bakery- Vestal Parkway, Vestal
This pizza is so good that I always order it plain, I feel like it doesn’t need toppings. They also load the pizza with sauce too, which is great, it’s a nice balanced sauce, and it works well with cheese, which again has american in it but it’s not overpowering, they cook it enough so that it browns up nice and isn’t overwhelmingly sweet. The dough has a little bit of a yeast flavor to it, but it’s nice and light and not dense, yet somehow a hard shell forms around the edges of the crust that makes it very enjoyable. I grew up with this, and it’s the only thing that my super skinny older sister claims she could out eat me as a kid. They make a pretty good traditional NY style round pizza too, but I prefer this style. It’s unique, it’s local, and it’s not too expensive. A plain half sheet is about $10, and then $20 for a full sheet. They also have some pretty good bread here, and I’m pretty sure I’ve had a really good canoli here too. If you haven’t been here, definitely check it out. Order a fresh pizza instead of just getting slices, trust me, it’s better that way.