Bar pizza is the pizza a bar serves alongside the beer: small, thin, crisp and loaded. Adam Kuban, founder of the pizza blog Slice and a bar-pizza enthusiast, describes the style in Ken Forkish’s The Elements of Pizza as round, very thin and decidedly crisp, usually loaded with toppings and cheese, and very much a 1950s and ’60s idea of pizza.
What defines bar pizza
Forkish’s list of what a bar pizza should be comes down to this:
- Very thin and crisp. Rolled out with a pin until it’s “like a piece of cloth,” in Forkish’s words. It doesn’t puff up at the rim.
- Sauce and cheese to the edge. There’s no outer ring of bare crust.
- A browned, crisp bottom, not soft or saggy.
- Baked in a pan. The pizza bakes in a round pan, so it keeps a perfect circle, and the cheese that reaches the pan wall fries into a crisp, browned rim.
On the South Shore of Massachusetts, the style has its own conventions. PMQ Pizza Magazine describes 10-inch pans with rims about an inch tall, greased and seasoned by years of use, and a blend of cheddars rather than mozzarella. “We put cheddar all the way to the edge,” Jeremy Jamoulis, chief operating officer of Cape Cod Café in Brockton, told PMQ.
Where it comes from
Bar pizza has origin stories in many places, which is part of the puzzle. Modernist Pizza found the same tale, a bar giving away pizza to sell more drinks, told about bar after bar. The earliest evidence its authors found was a November 16, 1934 newspaper ad from Roma Gardens in Hackensack, New Jersey, offering free pizza on Saturday nights. Eddie’s Pizza in New Hyde Park, New York, established in 1941, trademarked “home of the bar pie.” Colony Grill in Stamford, Connecticut, and the Star Tavern in Orange, New Jersey, date from 1945, and the Lynwood Cafe in Randolph, Massachusetts, from 1949. Many of these places were opened or expanded after the Second World War by young men from Italian-American families coming home from service.
The South Shore of Massachusetts has its own long-running bar pizza scene. Cape Cod Café in Brockton opened as a bar in 1939 and added pizza after E. James “Papa” Jamoulis took it over in 1947, according to PMQ. In Stoughton, Henry and Rena Phillips bought the Town Spa, then an upstairs bar, in 1955 and started its pizza business there, according to the restaurant’s own history (checked October 14, 2026); its current building opened in 1986.
Modernist Pizza doesn’t count bar or tavern pizza as a distinct style: its authors found the pizzas too varied across the Midwest and Northeast to define one. Kuban makes a similar point in Forkish’s book: very few places that make it call it bar pizza.
The lace edge
The crisp rim is the part people come for. When cheese is taken right to the edge, the cheese touching the hot pan wall browns and crisps instead of just melting. Kuban’s recipe builds the edge on purpose: grated pecorino goes over the bare dough at the rim, then white cheddar rings the outer edge against the pan before the mozzarella covers the sauce. As the recipe’s introduction in Forkish’s book puts it, the cheese on the rim “gets crisp and packs a punch.”
Forkish’s dough recipe ideally calls for a nonstick deep-dish pan, and his method puts the dough into it with no added oil.
Pans
- A 12-inch nonstick deep-dish pan. This is what Kuban uses, from LloydPans. Forkish notes that the versions with perforated bottoms crisp the crust without finishing it out of the pan.
- A seasoned 10-inch skillet. Forkish’s alternative, with a smaller 160 g dough ball; the recipe’s introduction suggests cast iron. The recipe doesn’t say whether to oil it, so prepare it the way its maker directs; that step is an adaptation, not part of Forkish’s method.
- A 10-inch pan with a rim about an inch tall is the South Shore format PMQ describes, greased and seasoned by years of use. Forkish’s recipe doesn’t cover it; if you use one, follow the pan maker’s directions.
The recipe
This is adapted from Adam Kuban’s bar pizza dough and his “Love Supreme” bar pizza in The Elements of Pizza. It makes four 12-inch bar pizzas. Forkish’s recipe calls for a stand mixer, since a smaller batch is hard for the mixer to knead. The dough follows his recipe table: 465 g of all-purpose flour and 9 g of oil. The table prints the oil as 5%, but 9 g is 1.9% of 465 g (calculated), so this page uses the grams, which match his method.
Time: about 15 minutes to mix, about 10 minutes to roll and top each pizza, about 11 minutes in the oven, and about 32 hours from mixing to the first pizza, most of it with the dough in the fridge. The dough balls keep for up to 72 hours.
Dough (makes four 190 g balls)
| Ingredient | Weight | Baker’s % |
|---|---|---|
| All-purpose flour | 465 g | 100% |
| Warm water, 90 to 95°F (32 to 35°C) | 280 g | 60% |
| Fine salt | 12 g | 2.6% |
| Olive or canola oil | 9 g | 1.9% |
| Instant yeast | 0.8 g | 0.17% |
| Total | 767 g |
For 10-inch skillets, Forkish makes the same batch into smaller balls, 160 g instead of 190 g. Four of them use 640 g of the 767 g, leaving about 127 g over (calculated).
Per 12-inch pizza
- 90 g smooth tomato sauce
- 25 g Pecorino Romano, finely grated
- 55 g mild white cheddar, coarsely grated
- 135 g low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella, coarsely grated
- Toppings, if you like. Kuban’s “supreme” combination is diced green pepper, thinly sliced red onion and loose Italian sausage. Precook watery vegetables if you pile them on; the bake is short.
For a 10-inch pizza, use about 70% as much of each, the difference in area (calculated): 60 g sauce, 15 g pecorino, 40 g cheddar and 95 g mozzarella.
Method
- Mix. Stir the salt into the warm water until dissolved, then the yeast, then the oil. Add the flour and knead with a stand mixer’s dough hook on medium speed for about 2 minutes, until the dough looks smooth and a little shiny.
- First rise. Cover and leave at room temperature until almost doubled, about 6 hours.
- Divide and refrigerate. Divide into four 190 g pieces, shape them into rounds, cover and refrigerate for at least 24 and up to 72 hours.
- Warm and preheat. About 60 to 90 minutes before baking, take a dough ball out. Put a steel or stone on the middle rack, not the top, and heat the oven to 550°F (290°C) for 45 minutes.
- Roll it thin. Flour the dough and the counter. Flatten the ball by hand to about half an inch, then roll it out with a rolling pin, flipping it and giving it a quarter turn now and then to keep it round. If it starts springing back, let it rest 5 to 10 minutes. Drape it over your knuckles to shake off loose flour.
- Pan it. Lay the dough in the 12-inch nonstick pan; Forkish’s method adds no oil. If it’s too small, let it rest in the pan until it relaxes, about 5 minutes, then press it out to the edges.
- Top. Spread the sauce to within half an inch of the edge. Scatter the pecorino over the sauce and the bare edge, ring the outer edge with the cheddar against the pan wall, cover the sauce with the mozzarella, and add any toppings.
- Bake. Set the pan on the steel and bake about 9 minutes, until the cheese is bubbling and starting to brown and the edges have pulled away from the pan.
- Finish the bottom. Bake 1 to 2 minutes more in the pan, or run a thin spatula around the edge, slide the pizza out and finish it directly on the steel, until the underside is golden-brown with some darker spots. Finishing on the steel crisps it more but can smoke.
- Serve. Cut into 6 slices.
Bar pizza and other thin crusts
| Style | Bakes | Edge | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bar pizza | In a round pan on a steel or deck | No bare rim; cheese fried against the pan wall | Wedges, 6 in Kuban’s recipe |
| Chicago tavern-style | On the deck | No bare rim; sauced to the edge | Small squares |
| New York | On a steel, stone or deck | A modest raised rim | Wedges |
Modernist Pizza found no significant difference between Chicago’s thin crust and bar pies elsewhere, and notes that the same kind of pizza turns up in New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts without the square cut. For the Chicago side, see Chicago deep-dish vs. tavern.
Sources
- Ken Forkish, The Elements of Pizza (2016): chapter 2 (American bar pizza, Adam Kuban’s description and the desired results), chapter 4 (the deep-dish pan), chapter 5 (ball weights and the rolling pin method), chapter 6 (Bar Pizza Dough: the ingredient table, with its printed 5% oil, the method, and the 160 g balls for a 10-inch skillet) and chapter 7 (Adam Kuban’s “Love Supreme” Bar Pizza: the preseasoned nonstick pan and the method).
- Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1, pages 105–106 and 236: bar and tavern pizza, Chicago thin crust, Roma Gardens, Eddie’s, Colony Grill, Star Tavern and the Lynwood Cafe.
- Tracy Morin, “Bar-Hopping: South Shore Bar-Style Pizza,” PMQ Pizza Magazine (April 1, 2024): 10-inch pans, cheddar blends and Cape Cod Café.
- Town Spa Pizza, “About” (checked October 14, 2026): the Phillips family’s 1955 purchase and the 1986 move.
- Pan areas and scaled weights are calculated.