Tomato Pie

In her richly textured chronicle, Joanna Kelly delivers a historic account of Frank Pepe and the pizza-centric street he made famous in New Haven, Connecticut. In this celebration of the life of America’s pizza pioneer, she shares the rags to riches story of Frank Pepe, an illiterate immigrant from the Amalfi Coast in Italy. Using his mother’s recipes, Pepe made his first pizza without mozzarella and called it tomato pie.  In 1925, Pepe began selling his pies from a push cart on the streets of New Haven. In 1937, he mastered his culinary destiny when he opened Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana on historic Wooster Street.  The first pizzeria in Connecticut and one of the first in the United States, the award-winning Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana has expanded into ten restaurants, from New York to Rhode Island.