Giuseppe "Joe" Papa was 17, fresh off a boat from Naples, when he opened a pizzeria in Trenton's Italian neighborhood in 1912. During the Depression, he and his wife Adalene sold a cheese pie and two sodas for a quarter and somehow still made it work. Everybody survived, Nick Azzaro — Joe's grandson and the current owner — likes to say, and they all died with money.
Papa's moved twice inside Trenton before the whole Trenton tomato pie tradition finally left the city in 2013. When Papa's made the move to Robbinsville, the crew didn't leave the ovens behind — they moved the original bricks, one by one, into a newer, bigger oven, so the same stones that had been baking pies for 40 years are still doing the job today. They still haul five gallons of real Trenton water in every morning, because Azzaro says it makes a real difference in the dough.
What comes out of that oven is genuinely different from a standard slice: cheese and toppings go down first, tomato goes on last, flipping the usual order and changing the whole bite. Then there's the Mustard Pie — a thin layer of spicy brown mustard under the cheese and tomato, which either clicks for you immediately or takes some convincing. Either way, it's been the house specialty long enough that nobody's changing it now.
Papa's has been called the oldest continuously family-owned pizzeria in the country, and in 2011, Azzaro settled the harder question — oldest pizzeria, period — in a public back-and-forth with New York's Lombardi's that made it into the Times and onto NPR.
19 Robbinsville-Allentown Road, Robbinsville, NJ. Open seven days.