Mama's TOO
The squares come off a gas oven. Bryan Kim rates the shop 8.8 and cannot settle which slice is the best one.
Why go
New York's square-slice lineage runs through Gravesend. L&B Spumoni Gardens has sold a sauce-on-top square there since 1938. Mama's TOO makes the other kind. The sauce goes underneath, and the thick pepperoni curls at the edges as it cooks.
Kim has now ranked the case two ways and both are on the record. In his review he puts the cacio e pepe, a white pizza on four cheeses and cracked black pepper, above the house triangle. In his pizza guide he says the cacio e pepe and the mushroom pie are not even the best slices here, and gives that place to the square pepperoni and to the triangle with fresh basil.
Kim says the square here will remind you of Prince Street Pizza's pepperoni square in Nolita. Prince Street no longer appears anywhere in his pizza guide.
The case at Mama's TOO turns over through the day, so you take what is out.
Order this / avoid
- Order: the pepperoni square and the house triangle, which the guide ranks highest, or the cacio e pepe, which the review ranks highest. Two of the three will be out.
- Order: a whole pie of one of them if you want a guarantee.
- Avoid: the sausage and peppers when you are only having one slice.
What locals & experts say
- Bryan Kim, The Infatuation, 13 January 2022, at 8.8: the cacio e pepe
will convince you that every pasta should be brought to a lab and reverse-engineered into a pizza.
1 - Kim's pizza guide, ranking it the other way: the square pepperoni
is worth a trip across the city, and the house triangular slice with fresh basil is as noteworthy as some of the other heavy hitters on this list.
2
Good to know
- Doors: the Broadway counter on the Upper West Side. A second Mama's TOO trades in the West Village.
- Getting in: no bookings, and the case is the menu.
- Jeff put this on the list himself, 3 September 2026.
Jeff's take (his words)
Not on Jeff's saved list. He named the place on 3 September 2026, in the paragraph he wrote on what New York is to him, and asked for it.
Verdict
should-visit — Go in cold weather. Kim once ate the squares here when it was fifteen degrees outside, wore two pairs of trousers to do it, and called it worth the trip. While you are deciding between his two rankings, the mushroom slice sits under both of them: his review builds it on two cheeses and caramelized onions, and his guide says the mushroom pie will enrich your life. Order that and let the argument run.