For Chefs, a Pizza Slice Shop Is Good Business. For Diners, It’s a Deal.

In San Francisco, Flour + Water Pizza Shop offers the familiar New York-style pie cut in triangular slices as well as the square Big Slice, shown here with pepperoni.

For decades, Wylie Dufresne worked at the cutting edge of haute cuisine, dreaming up high-concept dishes like deconstructed eggs Benedict or cubes of aerated foie gras. Today, the chef is focused on something far more familiar to eaters everywhere: New York-style pizza.

With Stretch Pizza, Dufresne began slinging slices and pies in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood in 2023 and has since expanded to two more locations. Stretch’s plain cheese slice looks a lot like what you might remember from your last run-in with a dollar slice shop: a large triangle of tomato-sauce-and-mozzarella-topped crust, thin and pliable enough to fold for one-handed eating, sturdy enough to take to-go. It’s served on the same floppy white paper plate.

But this one turns the flavor up to 11 (and the price up to $4.50), thanks to factors like a custom flour blend, multiday dough fermentation, and pizza sauce spiked with soy sauce for added umami. Dufresne is one of a growing number of fine-dining chefs breathing new life into the humble New York slice.

In San Francisco, Eric Ehler and Peter Dorrance dropped out of fine-dining careers, too, for slice-shop life. The duo met while working at the Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s, and in 2022 opened Outta Sight Pizza in the city’s Tenderloin district. They expanded to Chinatown earlier this year.

Ehler had dabbled in pizza for years; now he’s falling out of love with the fine-dining scene that had initially drawn him to San Francisco. “I love the diligence and technicality of fine dining,” Ehler said. “But the stuffiness, the people we’re serving, that’s not me.”

Dollars and Sense

In recent years, restaurants have struggled to raise prices enough to cover ballooning costs. Daniel Holzman, who co-founded a minichain of casual trattorias called The Meatball Shop in New York in 2010, put it bluntly: “The economics of a traditional restaurant don’t work anymore.” He has since moved to Los Angeles—and opened a slice shop.

When Holzman opened Danny Boy’s Famous Original Pizza, which now has locations in Westwood and Downtown L.A., he set out to make “pizza authentic to 1996 New York.” For him that means a tightly edited menu of classics like pepperoni, meatball and a white pie with mushrooms. A Buffalo Chicken pizza with housemade hot sauce, breaded chicken, mozzarella and ricotta is as experimental as he gets. Still, Holzman puts his cheffy spin on things, fermenting his dough for five days to develop flavor and topping it with farm-fresh local ingredients. Pricing slices at $5 and up allows the shop to offer an affordable meal, by L.A. standards, while still turning a healthy profit.

Fans eat slices outside Fini Pizza, in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood.

Fini Pizza’s tomato slice.

Sean Feeney, co-owner of the high-end Brooklyn Italian hot spots Lilia, Misi and Misipasta, opened his first slice shop in 2022, with former Misi chef Will Unseld. The ovens at Fini Pizza (currently four locations) churn out big New York slices and pies topped with Gustarosso tomatoes, “the best tomatoes in the world,” he said. The mozzarella comes from a 100-year-old family business in Williamsburg.

“What I’ve found with pizza is that it’s addressing the biggest challenges of operating a restaurant that looks like Lilia and Misi,” Feeney said. “At Fini, we have a smaller menu and footprint, and we have smaller teams.” The business expanded to Amagansett, Long Island, in 2023, and now has shops in downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights, too. A Utah location is in the works for 2026.

Diner Demand

Pizza, even the artisanal variety, makes for a budget-friendly meal, and the sturdy New York style lends itself to the booming consumer demand for takeout and delivery. Many elevated slice shops are currently in expansion mode.

Zak Fishman spent five years in the Brooklyn hospitality scene before opening Prime Pizza (eight locations, and counting) in L.A. in 2014. “You can run a pizza shop on the linen bill of a fine-dining restaurant,” he said.

From left: Ryan Pollnow, Thomas McNaughton and Elliot Armstrong of Flour + Water Pizza Shop.

The Conrad pizza (mushrooms, kale, taleggio, fresh mozzarella, red onion, roasted garlic) at Flour + Water Pizza Shop.

Ryan Pollnow and Thomas McNaughton, the chefs behind San Francisco Italian icon Flour + Water, opened their first slice shop in 2022. A second Flour + Water Pizza Shop, near Oracle Park, followed in April of this year, and a shop in Oakland is currently under construction.

The delivery boom was both an economic motivation and a creative prompt: The wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas at Flour + Water are too small to sell by the takeout slice, and too moist and delicate for delivery; for their pizza shops, the chefs developed a pie they say is influenced by New York style, but with a smaller circumference and a heavier char than a typical New York pizza’s. An extra layer of low-moisture cheese between dough and sauce helps lock in heat for travel. “We wanted to make it just as good sitting on your couch as the restaurant,” McNaughton said.

Advancements in electric ovens—particularly those from Swedish company PizzaMaster—have enabled this recent expansion. The equipment eliminates the need for a gas line and offers a level of temperature control and precision unmatched by gas versions.

Back in New York, Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli, who have run the iconic Brooklyn trattoria Frankies 457 Spuntino since 2004, opened F&F Pizzeria nearby in 2019, serving slices and whole pies out of electric deck ovens.

F&F’s tender, pillowy pies come in variations like hot sausage and brown-butter sage, and a clam pizza with fresh lemon and red chile flakes. The concept will expand to Pittsburgh later this month, and Manhattan next year. “Everybody likes pizza,” Castronovo said. “Even at $5 or $6, it’s an affordable food and a profitable food for the operator.”

Nostalgia has played a role, too. I spoke to a dozen new-school slice operators for this story, and in explaining their attraction to pizza, every one of them mentioned a favorite childhood pizza shop by name. “I’m a core millennial, and we have the buying power right now,” Ehler said. “We want what we loved as kids.”