Rhode Island's Pizza Strip...Tease

Chips & Strips

One of my favorite things about passing through the Ocean State isn't the seafood. Well, it's also the seafood. What really gets the blood flowing though, is walking into any Italian bakery around Providence— Scialo Bros., D. Pamlieri's, take your pick.

Instead of the sweet smell of confectionery sugar-dusted air and a waft of anisette, in Rhode Island you're immediately getting an open-hand smack of rich tomato sauce and dried oregano the minute you open the door—like getting duked a fin to the face from your Uncle Tony.

Wait, did I just walk into a bakery or a pizzeria?

Hands Off The Original Italian Bakery's Strips

This isn't Italian. It's Italian American culture at its finest. And in Rhode Island, the line between neighborhood bakery and pizzeria never completely came into focus.

In fact, if you've read any of my prior stuff, you've likely learned that before the pizza man existed, there were bread bakers—men who came from the motherland knowing how to bake a delicious loaf of bread in an old-ass oven and, out of necessity, learned how to stretch a day's dough a little further.

Slather some with tomato, bake it in a rectangular pan, and serve it at room temperature—suddenly that same dough had another job. Another ingenious example of how Italians change the shape of something and pretend it's a brand-new thing.

Relax, I'm Italian.

In places like Philly and Utica it became known as tomato pie. Hazleton, PA has its own red-sauced pitz. And in Providence, Italian bakeries cut theirs into strips, call them Pizza Strips—or locally, Red Strips—and sell them right next to the cannoli.

What About the Cheese?

There isn't any.

Some say it's because the sauce is meant to be the star, like Nonna's Sunday sauce. No one remembers the pasta—they reminisce about the chunks of tomato, basil and garlic.

Others tell a much more entertaining story. According to local lore, the state wasn't thrilled about cheese-topped pizza sitting around unrefrigerated on bakery counters all day. So rather than change how they stored or served it, the bakers came up with a beautifully stubborn solution:

They took off the cheese.

Whether that's documented history or generations of bakery-counter folklore, I don't really care. It's the version I will be telling at dinner parties.

Usually pre-sliced and wrapped in wax paper, pizza strips are like snowflakes—no two are exactly alike, and that's what's awesome about them.

The Palmieri family's baking roots in Providence stretch back to 1905, when Domenico Palmieri opened a small neighborhood bakery. His grandson Domenic would eventually open D. Palmieri's in Johnston, where bread, biscuits and their famous cold pizza were among the original staples, often cooling by the door, with the smell drawing customers in off the street.

More than a century after the Palmieri family first started baking in Rhode Island, that cold pizza—better known these days as Party Pizza—is still doing its job.

Nearby, The Original Italian Bakery took the idea one step further with its Pizza Chips—let's call them circular strips. The thick sauce tastes like a family recipe passed down for generations, while the jalapeño topping gives you just enough lip sting to chase it with a sip of Del's frozen lemonade.

I Learned it on Bravo

Of course, these are just two stops in a state full of bakeries slinging Pizza Strips. And if you needed any further proof that these things are woven into Rhode Island culture, look no further than Rhode Island Real Housewife Alicia Carmody casually breaking them out on the beach.

See? And you thought I was wasting my life watching reality TV.