Last week we shared the story of our adventure going all around Queens looking for good and interesting pizza.  And since January is a pretty quiet month, we decided to go on another pizza journey – this time to our neighboring state of Connecticut.  Connecticut isn’t always what you think of first when you imagine good pizza, but in fact New Haven-style pies are considered some of the best in the country, and that influence filters out into some other communities around the state.  So we decided to go beyond New Haven and see if we could find some other excellent pizza in Connecticut, and here are our results!  Each one of these places is in a town that has a train station (either Metro North or Shoreline East), so they’re accessible to city folk who want to explore.  Just one warning, though, that there is one image of a meat-based pizza here.

Let’s start furthest from home:  out in Old Saybrook, on the Connecticut coast, is Alforno Trattoria.  It’s in an unassuming strip mall, but when we rolled up there at 4:50pm for their 5pm dinner opening, there was already about a dozen people outside waiting to get in, which really speaks to how popular this place is.  Alforno has a full menu of pastas and entrees and such, but we just went with a medium of their “famous” pizza, topped with caramelized green peppers.

A little further west on the coast was Mike’s Apizza in West Haven.  This place has the atmosphere of a dive bar that just happens to serve pizzas, but it seemed like every single patron was ordering a pie for themselves, so we dug in.  Here’s a medium topped with breaded eggplant.

North from there, in the town of Waterbury, is Domenick & Pia.  It’s a little hard to find because it sits on an alley, and the space can get a little cramped if you want to sit and eat, but we squeezed in.  You can get slices, and that’s what most people seemed to be coming in for, but we got a medium cheese pie with red peppers on top.

And now for our last stop:  Coalhouse Pizza in Stamford.  They have a pretty extensive pizza list, and we were feeling rather hungry when we got there, so we ordered several different pies to try.  Here’s the Blue Skies, made simply with mozzarella, parmesan, and tomato sauce …

… and this is the Kicker, topped with poblanos, jalapeños and a habanero oil …

… and Cyril also tried the Favorite Things, with prosciutto, pesto sauce, mozzarella, ricotta, Parmesan and rosemary.

After all this pizza we were both in agreement on which one was our favorite:  we enjoyed Alforno the most.  But the other three places all had things to recommend them – Mike’s and Domenick & Pia were both great old school, casual places, while Coalhouse had such a huge variety of pizzas – including lots of vegetarian options – that you could really go there several times to try everything out.  And beyond the food, we also liked that we got to travel around Connecticut and visit a bunch of towns we’d never been to before.  We’ve got a few more pizza adventures on our mind, but for now we’re really glad we got to explore and try a bunch of really good pizzas.