Somerville’s Bow Market will be the new home to the South Shore’s bar pizza. There is a small window where you can order a North Shore roast beef sandwich or South Shore bar pizza. Hot Box is where it all started. The pizza has been arguably the best on the South Shore. Hot Box opened in 1918 and takes a different approach to the traditional South Shore pizza. The pizza started as a bar snack that would keep patrons drinking. However, over the years, pizza has become the main attraction. It is now on many of several restaurants in Somerville, Cambridge, Austin, TX, and Brooklyn, TX.
Many love how the cheese encases the crust and consider it to be a truly unique type of pizza. Bar pizza is served once a week at Puritan & Company in Cambridge. This is a one-of-a-kind type of pizza that can only be found in certain parts of the United States. We are fortunate to have the inventors of the pizza create it for all in the Massachusetts area to enjoy. It is not a new concept to the area, as it was created several decades ago.
Those on the South Shore may remember having this small, thin-crust pizza at Hoey’s Pizza, Poopsies, or Venus Café in Whitman. Just mention bar pizza and you’re sure to spark a debate over who makes the best bar pizza on the South Shore. Not only do people debate who makes the best bar pizza, but they also debate who the original inventor of the pizza is.
Most people would agree that the pizza was developed on the South Shore between the 1940s and 502 in small hole-in-the-wall restaurants. It measures about 10 inches wide, made in pans and placed into a deck oven in a small kitchen bar.
The bar pizza is different from other pizza’s, such as those you’ll find in Boston or New York because the dough is thinner on the bottom, cracker-thin; the cheese and other toppings extend to the ends of the pizza. It’s a small pizza packed with a ton of flavor, which is why it is such a treat.
In the beginning, the bar pizza recipes were handed to one bar to another throughout the South Shore. This is what helped it spread in its popularity. Some South Shore restaurants have been serving bar pizza since they were first created. There are generations of people who have been making this pizza on the South Shore, such as Campanella’s in Lynwood.
The recipe has pretty much remained the same, as the restaurants are likely trying to maintain the appeal for this small bar food. Some of the restaurants that serve it will say that it is the cheese that makes the pizza, while others would argue that the key is how the pans are seasoned. Whatever it is, the bar pizza is still just as popular today as it was decades ago.