Apizza — In London!

Londoner Max Lewis was in line at Sally’s Apizza with his friend Dan when a wise stranger recommended the potato pie. It was late 2023, nine months before Lewis would open his own apizza spot across the pond.

“No, I’ve got a plan,” he told the man. 

Lewis had come all the way from London just to sample the famed New Haven style, and he’d already thought through which pies to get and what order to eat them in.

Lewis was caught off guard, then, when he got to his table and his server brought over two slices of potato pie. ​“At this point, I’ve not been in New Haven for an hour,” he told me, recounting the story over a recent Whatsapp voice call. He remembered thinking, ​“Where does this happen, where people feel so strongly about a pizza that they’ll give you their pizza?”

The answer, he realized over the course of the apizza-fueled year he’d have, was New Haven.

“At some point, I just became possessed by all this stuff,” Lewis said. At 38 — ​“I’m no spring chicken” — he learned how to cook in the past couple years out of a deep desire to recreate the thin, charred crust, fresh dough, and satisfyingly non-stringy mozz of New Haven apizza. He heard about the style online and became a mega-fan of longtime Sally’s chef Ray Santiago as well as of other New Haven pizzamakers. 

As Lewis visited New Haven, refined his apizza palate, and befriended tons of New Haveners, including Santiago, he started to think he could be the one to introduce the London crowd to something new. Through Craig Taylor of Ozzy’s Apizza in East Rock, he connected with Can Bektas of London’s Bedford Tavern and got the chance to set up shop as Lenny’s, an apizza spot in the London pub.

Time and time again over at Lenny’s in London, Lewis has encountered visitors from Connecticut or the larger New England area whose stay in England gives them a new appreciation for how good they always had it, pizza-wise.

“If you grew up there and you grew up eating the pizza, you couldn’t understand how bad it is” in the U.K., Lewis said. The landscape Lewis broke into, according to him, was full of chain restaurant styles and fluffy Neapolitan pizza, which left him ​“eternally disappointed.”

I asked Lewis if it was hard getting the British palate to accept ah-beetz. He said it caught on quite quickly, despite initial bristling. He ​“aggressively went after it instead of desperately seeking acceptance,” knowing in his heart that New Haven-style pizza was better than any other he’d seen or eaten in his life.

“The Brits don’t always like confidence,” he said with a laugh, ​“but the pizza speaks for itself.”

Lewis has noticed, over time, that the visitors to Lenny’s in London who grew up on Connecticut pizza end up returning to Lenny’s again and again. He watches them relax into their old routines, coming weekly like they used to do back home. He tries his best to recreate all the details of the New Haven experience, down to the metal baking trays and white paper he serves the pies on and the shakers of cheese and chili flakes — things we take for granted but that are, according to Lewis, unheard of where he’s from.

Further cementing Lewis in New Haven tradition is the fact that, at less than one year in business, Lewis is already in some serious apizza skirmishes. ​“Sally’s has me blocked on Instagram,” he told me. Lenny’s had just been born when Lewis and Santiago celebrated on Instagram Live and Santiago was let go from Sally’s after what he said was 50-plus years of service. 

Sally’s Apizza did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.

Lewis said restaurants have accused their chefs of selling him their secrets, which he shrugged off as ridiculous. He doesn’t claim to be at the level of New Haven apizza chefs, though he tries every day, and he says what he does is out of an obsession, a passion, a hint of destiny, and a careful studying of all that’s publicly available, on YouTube and at the pizzeria tables.

According to Lewis, New Haven-style apizza is the best in the world — ​”I don’t even think there is a dispute.” In wondering why it’s often overshadowed in nationwide pizza debates, Lewis posited, ​“It’s right next to New York, they’re very loud about their pizza.” He imagines New Haven’s collective consciousness saying, ​“Yeah, our pizza’s better than that, but what do we need to do, shout about it?”