Santa Cruz pizza guide: Does our pizza-obsessed county have its own style?

Santa Cruz County is obsessed with pizza. 

If you need proof, just look at these numbers: between Boulder Creek and Watsonville, there are more than 70 places to buy pizza in the county, from parlors and restaurants to slice shacks and pop-ups. Given a population just north of 260,000, that means our little coastal community boasts a higher pizza-per-capita ratio than both New York City and Chicago, two cities famous for their distinct styles. 

So far, we have yet to reach a saturation point – if one even exists. In just the past year, another handful of new pizza businesses have opened, each aiming to offer fresh interpretations on the enduring combination of dough, sauce and toppings. At least one more is slated to open early next year. But despite grumblings on and off social media about “yet another pizza place,” most of the new openings seem to easily slide into the fabric of the community. A year or more later, the vast majority are still open, suggesting that the apex of Peak Pizza is still off in the distance.

Is pizza Santa Cruz’s favorite food, and why? Well, it could just be that we’re in California, where, in the late ’70s and early ‘80s, the farm-to-table movement created a new pizza style rooted in the Bay Area. San Francisco chef Ed LaDou is credited with creating the innovative Neapolitan-ish pies with unconventional toppings that would become known as “California style.” LaDou worked with famed chef Wolfgang Puck at Spago in the early 1980s, and later helped create the menu for the chain California Pizza Kitchen, including its signature barbecue chicken pizza. 

At the same time, Alice Waters returned from a trip to Italy and installed a pizza oven at her groundbreaking Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and began serving pizzas topped with seasonal ingredients as early as 1980. 

Santa Cruz started making a name for itself with pizza around that time, too. The first Pizza My Heart location opened in Capitola in 1981, serving New York-style pizzas by the pie or slice to locals and tourists walking in off the beach. In 1997, it merged with Santa Clara-based chain Pizza A Go-Go and spread throughout the Bay Area and Central Coast. With surf iconography and local history decorating every restaurant, Pizza My Heart has become part of the identity of Santa Cruz, and helped establish the big, floppy slice of pizza as an iconic surfer snack. 

But these days, there is a lot more to pizza in Santa Cruz than an inexpensive meal grabbed after a day at the beach. 

Over the past decade, and particularly in the past five years, growth in the industry has been driven by small, independent chefs. They approach pizza – the ultimate everyman’s dish – with the same passion normally associated with fine-dining menus. Restaurants including Bantam in Santa Cruz and Mentone and Cavalletta in Aptos, and pop-ups such as Sleight of Hand and Pizza Bones, curate toppings seasonally and source directly from local farms. Many feed sourdough starters with organic, locally milled flour and leave it to ferment for several days before passing the finished dough through an elite wood-fired oven. The result is a complex, elevated dish with an outward simplicity that belies the high level of craftsmanship required to create it.

Chefs are also paying tribute to regional pizza styles. California-style pizzas – inspired by traditional pizza making in Naples – are now joined with long rectangular Roman pizza, thick, focaccia-like Detroit-style pies, enormous New York pizzas with Ninja Turtle-esque slices, and even New Haven-style “apizza” from Connecticut topped with red sauce and pecorino romano, or clams, garlic and olive oil. 

With this maelstrom of sauce and cheese swirling around, is there anything distinctive about pizza made here that sets it apart from other pizza-obsessed locales? In other words, does Santa Cruz County have its own pizza style? 

Local pizza makers, despite each having a distinct personal style, are divided on whether Santa Cruz can lay claim to its own. 

Santa Cruz’s pizza culture is rooted in Pizza My Heart’s legacy, said its executive chef, Spencer Glenn, and not just because it’s the largest chain. It’s also an incubator for talent, with many chefs working for years in its kitchen before going on to establish their own businesses, including Pizza Series in Scotts Valley and Ozzy’s Pizzeria in Watsonville. “That’s something we’re really proud of,” said Glenn. 

Innovation sets Santa Cruz pizza makers apart, said Glenn. “The main thing you see coming out of Santa Cruz is a fearless attitude. We can put anything on a pizza and make it good. There’s a lot of experimental toppings,” he said. “On our menu, we’ve got pizzas with green apples, some with figs, and a seasonal élote-based pizza with corn and chorizo.”

Jayne Droese of La Marea Cafe and Pizzeria in Capitola agrees. “People are putting their own individual stamp on pizza, and that goes along with the spirit of Santa Cruz,” she said. “The area attracts people that are more bohemian and less interested in following the status quo. That transfers into the food scene when people incorporate their individual style into their food. There’s more creative freedom from the generic norms of pizza styles.” At La Marea, Droese highlights local farmers on her menu of thick, Detroit-style pan pizzas. 

Other pizza makers, such as brothers Brando and Kristian Sencion of Slice Project in Watsonville, are passionate about classic regional styles. They craft their New York- and Detroit-style pies using high-quality traditional ingredients, down to the flour, brick cheese and cup pepperoni. “The Santa Cruz pizza, if you can think of it that way, is more vegetable-driven. In Watsonville, people like the classics,” said Brando.

Santa Cruz might not have its own pizza style yet, but according to Matt Driscoll at Pizza Series, the area is in a “pizza renaissance” and it’s only a matter of time. “The Bay Area is well-known for pizza places, and I think Santa Cruz is really stepping it up in comparison,” he said. “I’m happy to see a boom in Santa Cruz.”

Driscoll offers both New York and Detroit-style pies and slices at his Scotts Valley restaurant, and reminisces about the gone-but-not-forgotten pizza parlors of Santa Cruz’s past on Instagram under the handle Santa Cruz Pizza Club (@SantaCruzPizzaClub). He and his fiancée and business partner, Maddie Quesada, have discussed what a Santa Cruz-style pizza would look like – maybe shaped like a surfboard or skateboard, or even shaped on a surfboard or skateboard – but are keeping their conclusions to themselves for now. 

Chef Benjamin Sims’ Westside Santa Cruz restaurant, Bantam, has enthralled guests and inspired chefs with its Santa Cruz-driven takes on wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas for more than 12 years, but he doesn’t see a common thread that links a local pizza style together. “In the ’90s, I was making pizzas at Chez Panisse and I felt like there was a common style running through the Bay Area. But even that has evolved, spread out and blossomed so much that I don’t even know if I’d say there’s a Bay Area style anymore,” he said. 

“I think the pizza here echoes the overall vibe of Santa Cruz. There’s not one style, there’s not one culture, there’s a myriad of different influences,” said Sims, who fondly remembers eating pizza at local parlors after school while growing up in Santa Cruz.

According to Justin Wadstein, pizza spinning champion (yes, it’s a thing) and owner of pop-up and catering company Sleight of Hand Pizza, Santa Cruz doesn’t have a pizza style, but it has changed over the past decade. “All pizza has its place, but people think differently about it now than they did five or 10 years ago. It can be a higher-end food,” he said. 

“People are doing more sourdough and long fermentation, and high-end toppings, more than just your standard pepperoni pizza. Over the past five-plus years, that’s become really popular, and people are searching that out,” said Wadstein. 

But that’s not so different from other areas, chef Todd Parker at Bookie’s Pizza in Santa Cruz pointed out. “There’s a pizza craze going on everywhere right now. It’s just a really approachable food that’s quick and easy for families. That was a really big part of my decision to get into the pizza game,” he said. 

He opened Bookie’s during the pandemic, when much of everyday life seemed uncertain: “I was like, I don’t know what this is going to look like at the end of the day, but people are going to eat pizza.”

It’s also a great creative outlet. Parker earned his stripes at high-end restaurants in the U.S. and abroad — including three-Michelin-starred Manresa in Los Gatos — before moving to the Santa Cruz area. At Bookie’s, he tops his Detroit-style pizzas with self-described “funky, different, weird” combinations including wild chanterelle mushrooms and guanciale, or Dungeness crab, artichokes and preserved lemon.

Parker believes pizza in Santa Cruz is too varied to claim one distinct style, and that more is on the horizon. “I don’t really think we’ve reached over-saturation at this point. I think we’ll probably see new and better places to come along, and some of the places that have just been in the holding pattern for years will probably go away,” he said. “There’s still a lot of different styles out there that you don’t see in Santa Cruz, so there’s plenty of opportunity for us to expand on pizza.”

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Santa Cruz’s pizza playbook

Get a taste for Santa Cruz-style pizza – if it exists – at these restaurants and pop-ups. From thick pan-pizzas to thin wood-fired pies and large New York-style slices, find pizzas topped with produce from local farms, imported from specific pizza-centric regions like Italy and Detroit, or grown in the chef’s own backyard. Each of the chef-driven places on this list offers a distinct perspective on pizza that is shaping Santa Cruz’s pizza culture, and will set you on a path to explore the dozens of other pizza eateries in Santa Cruz County.