# Modern Apizza Never Left State Street, or Its Name
New Haven’s pizza rivalry usually plays out on Wooster Street, where Frank Pepe’s and Sally’s Apizza sit a few doors apart and have spent decades trading regulars. Modern Apizza isn’t on Wooster Street at all. It’s on State Street in the East Rock neighborhood, a few blocks from where the building first opened as a pizzeria in 1934, and it has never moved and never expanded to a second location in over ninety years.
The space began as Tony’s Apizza, opened by Antonio “Tony” Tolli, an Italian immigrant who’d learned to bake from his uncle at a New Haven pastry shop and built a coke-fired brick oven into the back of a rented storefront. A pie cost a quarter. Tolli went on to open other pizzerias around Greater New Haven, but the State Street shop changed hands during World War II, when a returning veteran named Louis Persano took over the lease. An employee of the new owner suggested the name Modern, since it had a new owner and needed something to distinguish it, and the name stuck from 1944 onward. Louis Persano left to become a New Haven firefighter in 1949, and the restaurant passed to Nick Nuzzo, who’d started working there as a fourteen-year-old in 1937. Bill and Mary Pustari took over in 1988 and have run it since, with the current generation, including their daughter Erica, now part of day-to-day operations.
What hasn’t changed through all those ownership transitions is the oven and the style of pizza it produces. Modern uses an oil-fired brick oven rather than the coal-fired ovens at Pepe’s and Sally’s, a difference apizza enthusiasts will point out as part of what separates Modern’s char and crust from its Wooster Street counterparts. The white clam pie, made with pre-shucked littleneck clams rather than clams shucked to order, is one of the house specialties, alongside the Italian Bomb loaded with sausage, bacon, pepperoni, and vegetables, and a Margherita made with fresh mozzarella from a cheesemaker in North Haven. Foxon Park sodas, bottled in nearby East Haven, are the standard accompaniment, much as they are at the Wooster Street pizzerias.
Modern, Pepe’s, and Sally’s are referred to locally as the “Holy Trinity” of New Haven apizza, and food critics and pizza-world rankings have circled back to Modern again and again over the years — a spot in Playboy’s list of the country’s best pizzerias decades ago, a Pizzeria of the Year title from a trade magazine more recently, a place in a 2019 documentary about the city’s pizza culture. None of that has translated into a second location. While Pepe’s has grown into a chain with more than a dozen outposts along the East Coast and Sally’s has opened locations around Connecticut and Massachusetts since a 2017 ownership change, Modern has stayed exactly where it started, just off the city’s tourist path, serving the same East Rock neighborhood that gave Tony Tolli his first customers.
The dining room has been renovated and expanded since the Pustaris took over, but the basic experience hasn’t shifted: a wait for a table on busy nights, a wood column in the basement still bearing a former owner’s pencil-scrawled nickname, and a pizza that regulars insist on ordering the same way they always have.
📍 874 State Street, New Haven, CT
🕐 Tue–Thu 10:30 am–9 pm, Fri–Sat 10:30 am–10 pm, Sun 3–9 pm; closed Mon
🔗 modernapizza.com