If you crave NY-style pizza, Little Pops in Naperville is the place

A pizzeria in Naperville has the best New York-style pizza not just in the Chicago area, but in the entire state, according to a new study by The Washington Post.

The newspaper set out to help people who crave a certain style of pizza, say Chicago’s deep-dish pizza or the wide-slice, thin-crust style favored by New Yorkers, track it down in areas outside of the towns that made it famous. They analyzed 7.5 million Yelp reviews and developed a formula to identify the best pizza.

For New York-style Pizza, Naperville’s Little Pops NY Pizzeria came in first, followed by Zazas Pizzeria in Chicago and Jimmy’s Pizza Cafe in Chicago. Nearby Pomodoro E Mozzarella in St. Charles ranked fifth.

Little Pops, located at 1819 Wehrli Road, is owned by Mike and Vicki Nelson. It makes sense why their pizza ranks for best New York slice because the couple came to Naperville from the Big Apple in 2009.

A business failure in New York forced them to restart their lives. They sold their construction and snow removal business to another person and began working for him, but things went south and they lost millions in equipment and real estate, he said.

Mike and Vicki went on a trip to Florida to visit his mother, who said she’d pay for the gas if they could just make it out there. They stopped at a New York-style pizzeria and thought: Why can’t we bring this to Naperville?

“We had lost everything and I was just screwing around on Craigslist and saw a pizzeria on Wehrli that was closed up,” Mike said. “I called my nephew in New York who runs a pizza place there, and asked him if he’d share the recipe with me. I figured if I could just sell 30 pizzas a day, we could make a living. That’s all I wanted to do.”

Now, the duo has expanded their pizzeria to an express location in Aurora off New York Street and are about to open a new restaurant in Lisle hopefully by the end of October.

“It brings tears to our eyes to think of where we started nine years ago and how we stuck to our New York roots and love of New York-style pizza,” Vicki said.

Mike said he did not realize how many other East Coasters live in the Midwest and how some will drive from an hour away to get a taste of home. He likes to joke that if a trip to Naperville is a bit of a haul, it still beats making an 800-mile trip home, he said.

The Washington Post’s formula to rank the pizza businesses took into account several factors, like number of reviews and how often the reviews mentioned that particular pizza style.

For Chicago-style pizza in the Chicago area, Lou Malnati’s ranked first, followed by Pequod’s and Giordano’s.

Other nearby suburban eateries included Ella’s Italian Pub in Geneva, ranking 3rd in Roman-style pizza; Kim’s Uncle Pizza in Westmont, ranking 5th in tavern-style pizza; and Pizzao 750 in Willow Springs, ranking 4th in Neapolitan-style pizza.

mejones@chicagotribune.com

Originally Published: Sep 11, 2023 at 9:20 pm