Regina Pizzeria (North End)
Brick-oven pies out of the same Thacher Street room since 1926, on a dough aged with the house yeast the Polcari family has kept. Boston Magazine says the mall outposts have nothing on this one.
Why go
Three generations of Polcaris have run it and the pitch has not changed: aged dough, a light sauce carrying aged romano, aged whole-milk mozzarella.2 Yiqing Shao put it in her North End pizza guide in 2017 and singled out the original room over the branches.1 The line outside is not new either. She dates it back to the opening year.1
Order this / avoid
- Order: the plain pie first, so you can taste the sauce against the aged mozzarella.1
- Avoid: the branches, when what you want is this. The name also trades at South Station and Faneuil Hall.3
What locals & experts say
- Yiqing Shao, Boston Magazine (January 2017):
The ubiquitous mall outposts have nothing on the charmingly timeworn original, which is still churning out brick-oven-baked pies with just the right sauce-to-aged-mozz ratio.
1
Good to know
- This is the Thacher Street door, the one that opened in 1926.2
Verdict
could-visit — The oven and the address have not moved since 1926 and the family still runs a dough on its own yeast, which is the whole reason to walk past the branch at South Station and find Thacher Street. Boston Magazine's guide separates the original from the outposts in the same breath, so the distinction is somebody else's as well as ours. That guide line is the only judgment of the food I found, and a room this old deserves a full review before it climbs.