Extra cheese, extra cash: Survey names NYC priciest pizza city in the nation
NEW YORK - New Yorkers are shelling out more dough than ever for pizza.
According to a new survey commissioned by the real estate website Clever, nobody's beating the Big Apple when it comes to the price of a pizza pie.
The average cost of a pie with one topping in New York City is now $33.65, the highest price in history and more than anywhere else in the nation.
"That's ridiculous," said one New Yorker when told about the cost.
Dollar slice era comes to an end at NYC's 2 Bros. Pizza
2 Bros. Pizza has announced that their famous $1 slices will now increase in price to $1.50, in order to deal with increased costs due to inflation.
FOX 5 NY visited Zillions Pizza in Midtown to see how high costs there were. A large cheese pie came to $28.31, a pie with pepperoni was $33.76, a buffalo chicken pie was $37.02 and a pizza with vegetables and meat would run you $40.
But while the prices may certainly be a shock for many New Yorkers, Scott Wiener, owner of Scott's Pizza Tours, says that prices have been pretty low for a very long time.
"If you remember paying $18 for a pizza ten years ago, it should be no surprise that it's more expensive now, especially with the kind of pizza that we've been getting in New York as of late," Wiener said. "You've probably noticed that pizza-by-the-slice shops have been getting better. They're higher quality. There's more talk of higher quality ingredients. I mean, everybody's freaking out about cup and char pepperoni. You know, everybody's loving the pepperoni that comes up. It's a lot more expensive than the kind of pepperoni that we used to use that stays flat. So, especially in a report that compares pepperoni pizzas, it's not exactly apples to apples when you're comparing different types of pepperoni, which lately New York pizza has been using more of this higher quality. Pepperoni, flour, tomatoes. All those things, of course, cost more."
According to Wiener, you can't compare prices in New York to any other city, because you're getting more quantity.
"If you're looking at the stats for how pizzerias operate, a 14-inch pizza, which is the standard large pizza for all the chains in New York City, that's a tiny pizza. We do an 18 or 20-inch pizza, so when you go from a 14-inch pizza to an 18-inch pizza, you're increasing the amount of food by 60%," Wiener said.
Since the pandemic, even New York City's venerable dollar slices have gone the way of the dodo, with 2 Bros. Pizza announcing last year that the price of a cheese slice would increase to $1.50.