Relive the Pizza Nights of Your Childhood at This Neighborhood Spot

A slice of pepperoni and a slice of white at Pizza Richmond / Photograph by Gab Bonghi

Every neighborhood deserves a great pizza place, and that’s exactly what Pizza Richmond is: a great pizza place.

It’s nothing more than that, but also nothing less. It’s just pizzas, a couple salads, soft-serve from 1-900-ICE-CREAM, and these wild, experimental specials (charred onion and sherry cream; slices of roasted sweet potato with a maple and sage white sauce), but again: just pizza, no matter how non-traditional.

Pizza Richmond is a sister to Pizza Shackamaxon, the Fishtown slice shop opened by the team behind Sally and Martha. And Richmond has that same kind of neighborhood gravity — drawing crowds and stacking up lines at the door at prime time, making itself a meeting place. Since there’s no phone, no online ordering, if you want a slice, a whole pie or a salad, you gotta show up. You have to stand there and wait, meet the neighbors, maybe make a friend.

The house red sauce leans savory, not sweet. The crusts are thin but not crackers — pliable almost all the way through. Not quite New York-thin, but more Philly-thin, with some strength to them — some chew. Each pie comes out of the electric PizzaMasters oven in the kitchen with some char, and I’d argue that char matters. Char provides character. Its inconsistency and imperfection make you feel that real people cooked your pie, not robots, and it becomes part of the flavor you remember — those blistered crusts and leopard-spotted bottoms.

Richmond’s red with pepperoni is solid. There’s a bite to it, mostly from the pepperoni, and every slice bleeds grease down your arm when you fold it. It’s a pizza made for ruining shirts. And each slice is large enough to protect you from a sudden rainstorm.

The white, on the other hand, is just extraordinary. Blobs of smooth ricotta, black pepper, this pesto-y sting that rides on top of all that cheese and dough, then whole cloves of roasted garlic tucked into the cheese, caramel-brown and soft enough to smear like butter, sweeter than you ever thought garlic could be. You can smell it from the doorway. Pick up a slice, and the scent will linger on your fingers for an hour.

The smartest thing Pizza Richmond ever did was not very much at all. It’s a restaurant that seems to exist to prove the axiom that it’s better to be very good at one thing than mediocre at a lot of things. That success lies in picking your one thing and doing it very well. Yes, it’s expensive. Pies cost around $30. The prices seem like robbery — until you see the size of the pies. Except for the cost, this is everything a neighborhood pizza shop needs to be.

And nothing more.

2 Stars — Come if you’re in the neighborhood

Rating Key

0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America

Published as “A Little Goes a Long Way” in the May 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.