Joe & Pat's

"My favorite pizzeria in Staten Island — and the crust is about as thin as it gets anywhere in the five boroughs."

Joe & Pat's is a pleasure to sit in, which is not something you can say about most pizzerias. The decor is charming without trying to be, the staff and the waitresses are genuinely nice, and the whole room feels like a throwback to a few decades ago — not staged, just never changed. You go for the pizza and end up staying longer than you meant to.

They give you paper plates to eat off, and that matters more than it sounds like it should. I grew up eating pizza on paper plates — at the pizzeria and at home. That is how it is supposed to be. A place that has been open since 1960 and still hands you a paper plate is not performing authenticity, it just never stopped.

Here is how good it is. The pizzeria once caught a customer on camera eating a slice that had been left behind at a table nobody had cleared yet — they could not wait for their own pie to come out. Joe & Pat's posted it themselves. When a restaurant can share a story like that as a compliment, you already know.

The tri-color pie — marinara, vodka and pesto, three sauces across one pizza. It is the order to get if you are bringing someone here for the first time, because it settles the argument about which sauce to get by not settling it.

Better still: get it half tri-color, half margherita. One side does the three sauces, the other does the plain, and you find out for yourself whether the crust is best carrying something or carrying nothing.

If you want the single most famous thing on the menu, it is the vodka pie: creamy vodka sauce in place of the usual tomato. And whatever you put on it, the crust is the reason to come — cracker-thin, with the sauce and cheese run right out to the edge so there is barely a border left to hold.

The Pappalardo family opened Joe & Pat's on Victory Boulevard in 1960, and they still run it. They spent more than half a century perfecting the thin crust in Castleton Corners before opening a second location in Manhattan’s East Village, which is on this map too — but the original is the one worth the trip across the water.

It is a proper sit-down restaurant rather than a slice counter, with a full menu of pastas and Italian entrees alongside the pizza. Long hours, seven days a week, which makes it easier to plan around than most of the old-guard places on this list.

Staten Island is the reason this one counts as worth the trip: from Manhattan it is the ferry plus a bus or a car ride out to Victory Boulevard. Worth it. If you genuinely cannot make the crossing, the East Village outpost runs the same recipe.

Staten Island has no subway, and the nearest Staten Island Railway stop is a forty-minute walk from Victory Boulevard — so the usual "nearest train" box would only mislead you here.