The Spring 2025 issue of Food & Dining Magazine is now available in all the familiar places: Louisville area eateries and food shops, newsstands and online (or read it at issuu).
“As various families perfected their own recipes and as cooks carried their trade secrets from kitchen to kitchen, these simple pies, perfect for slugging back with a beer, became ubiquitous post-shift meals throughout the so-called Irish Riviera of Boston’s South Shore.”
Wikipedia helpfully defines the geography.
The South Shore of Massachusetts is a geographic region stretching south and east from Boston toward Cape Cod along the shores of Massachusetts Bay and Cape Cod Bay.
Eater Boston further sets the table.
The bar pizza itself is unfussy and straightforward. It’s a 10-inch round pie with cheese and other toppings flowing from edge to edge — no border crust sees the light of day. These days, a bar pizza costs around $10 topped with cheese, and each additional topping adds $1.
It’s typically baked in a lipped, 10-inch, well-seasoned steel or cast iron pan, specialty bakeware similar to those sold by Lloyd Pans, a manufacturer of regional pizza tools that includes the square pans for Detroit-style pizza. But the diehard South Shorers prefer their pies made in the steel pans sold by Baystate Restaurant, a food service supply store in Brockton, Massachusetts, for its quality and old-timey value.
Hence the reference to snowflakes, because bar pizza (or bar pies) are made of the same ingredients, “yet no two are exactly alike.”
An Insider’s Guide to South Shore Bar Pizza: A Regional Massachusetts Phenomenon Goes Mainstream, by Scott Kearnan (Boston Magazine)
It’s crispy, it’s cheesy, and it’s a cult-favorite with a die-hard fan base and a culture all its own. Here, an insider’s guide to the legendary bar-pizza veteran joints and all the trendy newbies, including unassuming taverns and flashy new food trucks slinging supreme pies.
I’d want the Harpoon IPA, not a sad-sack Miller High Life, but ultimately the point is cultural as much as it is culinary.
What is it that explains the cult appeal of such unabashedly un-fancy pizza? Bar pies are delicious, but there must be more to it. How did a variation on something as pedestrian as a personal pan pizza become such a local, and now national, phenomenon? Why is a food that’s been around for nearly 80 years suddenly on everyone’s lips right now?
I decided it was time to hit the road for answers, and for a slice of South Shore life.
A few links to fill in the gaps. As usual, writing this post has left me hungry.
- South Shore Bar Pizza Social Club (Fb): “Devoted to our love of South Shore-style bar pizza, a working-class tradition in the pubs, taverns and dive bars south of Boston, Massachusetts.” Today’s cover photo credit.
- Bobby Owens: America’s first and only celebrity pizza pan salesman (Fb): “Local legend at Bay State Restaurant Products in Brockton, the go-to bar-pizza-pan provider on the South Shore.”
- South Shore Bar Pizza (Instagram): “Come take a tour of the finest South Shore Bar Pizzas in all of the world.”
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“Edibles & Potables” is Food & Dining Magazine’s Sunday slot for news and views that range beyond our customary metropolitan Louisville coverage area, as intended to be food (and drink) for thought.
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Edibles & Potables: “Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit,” a book by Josh Noel
