November 27, 2015
Robbinsville, NJ
You may not have heard of Robbinsville, NJ, but it is a pretty well-known town in the pizza world. It is a small town right near Trenton, and had two pizzerias on the 2015 (& 2016) list. We decided to hit Papa’s Tomato Pies first. It ranked pretty high on the list at #12, so we had high hopes for it. Even the NYT wrote an article about it.
These tomato pies are “Trenton-style”, which (if you have been following our previous posts) means crust-cheese-tomato sauce. The sauce is pretty close to plain crushed tomatoes, which isn’t a bad thing considering we are talking about Jersey tomatoes here.
Papa’s Tomato Pies is also the oldest continually-operating pizza place in the US. It was started in 1912, although it started out in Trenton before moving to the suburbs.
We chose to come here on Black Friday, and we ordered two different pies. A plain tomato pie, of course (on the top) and a veggie one (on the bottom). Both smalls, because we could only eat so much pizza the day after Thanksgiving.
The pizza was good, but it wasn’t quite as good as we expected given the high ranking on the list and the fact that its been open for over 100 years. It probably made the list because it would be impossible to exclude the longest-operating pizza place in the country! Although, we should note that on the 2016 list, it has dropped down significantly to #80.
We were interested to compare it to the other pizza place in Robbinsville that made the list, Delorenzo’s Tomato Pies – but you will have to check back for that post!
To visit:
Papa’s Tomato Pies
19 Robbinsville Allentown Road
Robbinsville, NJ 08691