The walls are closing in! Do you smell burning feathers?
An Original Ray's Pizza moves to New Jersey

There are so many pizza restaurants in Manhattan with Ray in their names that their abundance rivals the ubiquity of Starbucks: Ray’s Pizza, Ray’s Original Pizza, Famous Ray’s Pizza and World-Famous Original Ray’s Pizza.

But the story line of this Ray’s might be titled “From Broadway to the Boondocks, With Extra Cheese.”

In the late 1970s, when Joe Russo and his brother John left their hometown in southern Italy and landed in New York, they wanted to continue the family cooking tradition, which included a secret pizza recipe. So they opened Ray’s Real Pizza, named after an uncle who was a good cook, on Eighth Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets. Word spread quickly and soon the place was filled with a mix of the theater crowd, actors, musicians, sports figures, tourists and neighborhood regulars.

But then their rent got raised...

So the Russo brothers shut down their place, took time off and then scouted the metropolitan area for a new location with a more realistic real estate deal. In 2005, they took their recipes and their photos of bold-faced names and settled on Hazlet, which is about an hour and 10 minutes by car from Times Square and might be considered a pit stop on the way to the Jersey Shore.

“We were looking for a new challenge,” said Joe Russo, 53. “And we thought we would look for the worst possible place to open, with the least amount of business, and make it work.”

God, I love New York.


Also, apparently the water's different, and sometimes they used to lock people in the bathrooms in their haste to close up shop. Nice article. New York entrepreneurs are the most ridiculous people ever.

I'm feeling slightly less hysterical now that I know this isn't The Original Famous Ray's. Or even The Original Bagel Ray's.