When it comes to New-York Style Pies, KC’s Northeast Pizza Delivers

Kansas City may excel in barbecue and steak, but it has long lacked excellent pizza. That’s not to diminish the exciting pie joints that have popped up over the past couple years, like Fortunati in the West Bottoms, the masterful Jhy Coulter’s Orange and the family-friendly City Barrel Pizza and Patio. In fact, the emergence of these successful pizzerias would suggest KC does indeed have a gap to fill.

It’s possible we’re in the midst of a pizza wave, and if so, Northeast Pizza, in its uncomplicated perfection, is part of it. The Pendleton Heights restaurant has the heart of a pizzeria from a ’90s movie, invoking something nostalgic in the way you can show up on a whim, order your go-to from a chalkboard menu and throw your kid a quarter to get a gumball from the coin-operated candy machine, all with little worry about the bill. There’s nothing new or shiny. There’s, with the highest of respect, hardly any innovation. Northeast Pizza’s simplicity drives home a universal truth: Pure, simple pizza is one of life’s most unifying pleasures—something everyone can agree on.

Owners Noah Quillec, Max Popoff and Michael DeStefano do us all a favor by not over-thinking their restaurant. Pizza is for you and me, your grandma, your grumpy neighbor and your punk teenager. The menu consists of New York-style ol’ faithfuls—cheese, pepperoni, supreme, pies smothered with white sauce and the like. Northeast Pizza pays homage to this Big Apple tradition by using the highest quality ingredients and making pies so large and thin you must hold your slice with two hands as you eat it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. 

Like Scarr’s and L’industrie in Lower Manhattan, both staples in New York’s namesake pizza style, Northeast Pizza uses the gold standard of tomatoes, Stanislaus. The vine-fresh sweetness is best experienced in the Brooklyn Margherita, spotted with a fresh, creamy mozzarella and peppery basil and finished with a gratuitous sprinkle of aged mozzarella and a drizzling of olive oil. The vodka pie has a similar makeup of ingredients but with an unparalleled creamy rich sauce that begs to be tossed over some penne. The house cheese, Grande, is a mozzarella blend and considered the essential fromage in New York pizzerias, an ingredient comparable to Marconi’s hot giardineria for Italian beef vendors in the Windy City. Any reputable New York-style pizza is doused with this stuff.

Northeast Pizza’s hand-tossed dough is wonderfully flimsy but with a slight chew. It requires no rustic sourdough starter or prefermentation method—techniques that are all the rage right now when it comes to anything taking the form of bread. Chef DeStefano, who is also the executive chef at Prairie Village’s Verbena, keeps his pizza dough technique New York-simple but still manages to create a delightful vessel. DeStefano does attribute the dough’s nice, light chewiness to a few of his signature techniques, such as letting it coldproof in the fridge. The pies are finished off with a run in the electric deck oven at 565 Fahrenheit, creating a crispy brown crust. 

At Northeast Pizza, there are seven curated 16-inch pie varieties to choose from—the trendy but not overrated combo of jalapenos, pepperonis and hot honey being one of them, blessed be—but you can also choose to create your own. Pizza is also sold by the slice, although flavors are limited to cheese, pepperoni and the “pie of the day,” which, upon one visit, was a dang-good thin-crust chicken Philly with white sauce and sweet onions. 

With its Gumby-green walls that match a vintage 7-Up sign, mint-colored booths and an actual inflatable Gumby hanging from the ceiling, Northeast Pizza definitely has a cool, quirky, vintage feel. The restaurant is Quillec’s efforts to steer away from the French fine dining environment he grew up in (his family owns and operates the Prairie Village gems Café Provence and the French Market) while also catering to the melting pot that makes up the pizzeria’s Northeast neighborhood, in which he’s lived for the past seven years.

But even more than it is cool, Northeast Pizza feels like home. Sitting off Brooklyn Avenue across from PH Coffee, there is an undemanding casualness that permeates the space. Come in, order a side of canned wine from Oregon or a good ol’ Coke, get your pie with a side of house-made ranch, then go hang at a table set with those ubiquitous pizza shop shakers filled with Parmesan and dried oregano. It’s good food with zero bells and whistles, except maybe the lemon slices served with the white pie. The lemon creates an unbeatable tang when combined with the garlic cream sauce in an untraditional, unexpected and fun twist.

I’ve refrained from describing anything as perfect, but the two salads I tried were very near it. The Caesar was well dressed in a pungent anchovy dressing and blanketed with snowy bits of freshly grated Parmesan, which is exactly what you hope for in the classic salad. The tomato-cucumber salad, inspired by a dish at Avelluto’s in Mission, is just that, but it’s lightly coated with a sour cream and ranch dressing with bits of fresh dill. My niece, the aforementioned punk teenager who proudly states her disdain for vegetables to her food critic aunt anytime possible, was fighting me for the last few bites.

With respect to the principles of delivering the quintessential foldable New York slice, creativity takes a respectful backseat at Northeast Pizza. Chef DeStefano says there’s room to play in the future, however, and hopes to offer regional styles as “pies of the day,” like the tomato pie from Philly served with twice the amount of sauce and finished with breadcrumbs.

There’s a saying that pizza is like sex. When it’s good, it’s really good. When it’s bad, it’s still kind of good. Many of us don’t have high pizza standards, but even so, we know a good slice of pizza when we have it. Northeast Pizza is better than good. It’s the kind of pizza you envision Macaulay Culkin eating in the limo in Home Alone 2 or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles riffing about with their rat sensei. Except at Northeast Pizza, you get to finish it all off with a chocolate chip cookie. Just don’t forget to bus your table when you leave.  

GO: 2203 Lexington Ave., KCMO. Open Tuesdays–Thursdays, 3–8 pm; Fridays, 3–9 pm; Saturdays, 11 am–9 pm; and Sundays 11 am–8 pm. (816)-957-0957. northeastpizzakc.com. 

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