Make no mistake — Evansville loves cracker crust-style pizza, or una pizza as some call it, and it’s a flavor that many city residents call their own.
Diners in the River City love this thin and tasty variety — with its meats, veggies, or even pineapple or tomato slices packed on top, mingling alongside or beneath the cheese. Popular spots such as Turoni’s Pizzery & Brewery, Deerhead Sidewalk Cafe & Bar, Spankey’s Una Pizza, Kipplee’s, and others have shown decades of staying power by banking and serving these crispy, savory pies year after year, square slice after square slice.
But a tour of Evansville restaurants finds a host of pizza tastes beyond the cracker crusts.
Neapolitan-style pies were introduced to the region in 2016 by Pangea Kitchen, where pistachio pizza is a signature item, and the Naples pepperoni, Margherita, and knuckleball varieties also aim to please. Pangea Kitchen goes even deeper into the pizza realm, literally, with its Detroit-style deep-dish pies, including The Baller, which has three cheeses, sliced Trinity meatball, Mike’s Hot Honey, roasted onions, and fresh basil. Find Neo-Neapolitan slices at Pangea Pizzeria in Downtown Evansville, which serves daily slices and pies of pistachio, Regina Margherita, and Cupperoni, a pepperoni pizza drizzled in Calabrian chili honey.
There’s more. Lombardi’s New York Pizza and Wings offers a taste of the Big Apple with their hearty, by-the-slice offerings, while The Slice is a well-known haunt that’s steps away from the University of Evansville campus. Casey’s Dugout on Lincoln Avenue is a newcomer to the scene and offers Evansville sports nostalgia (try The Hitman, in honor of baseball hero Don Mattingly), while Roca Bar — which moved to the East Side after a lengthy history on South Kentucky Avenue — dates to 1953 and lays claim to being “Evansville’s Original Pizza.”
Pizza and entrepreneurship collided in Evansville back in 2014 with the forming of Azzip Pizza on the city’s West Side. The made-to-order personal pizzas were a smash, and Azzip has since expanded to other cities in Indiana, as well as Kentucky. The March Crabness is a crowd-pleasing specialty during that month of the year.
And while not technically a pizza, strombolis — baked in foil and steaming with pizza ingredients — always go over big in the River City. Many pizza shops and other restaurants have the stromboli, although locals will tell you that Pizza King, a regional chain that also sells traditional pizzas, has second-to-none stroms.
