Pennsylvania’s quirky Altoona pizza tastes better than it looks

Some people see a slice of Altoona-style pizza and believe a crime has been committed.

Don’t call it Sicilian, they say, call the police.

They recoil at the list of ingredients first cooked up, according to legend, in a local hotel in the Blair County railroad town over a half-century ago. There are layers of salami, tomato sauce, and green peppers piled atop a thick slice of dough, with a suspicious layer of yellow stuff blanketing everything.

“Good god,” one commenter wrote on a Reddit thread about the pizza, “is that American cheese!?”

Steve Cokrlic Jr. has read the comments over the years as his family’s shop, The Original 29th Street Pizza, Subs, & More, has had minor brushes with viral fame. There have been articles written. Social media foodies have popped in or even made their own. People drive from all over the country, he said, to stop in for an Altoona slice and most, he said, leave with a different opinion.

“People usually say, ‘That looks disgusting,’ but they just gotta try it,” Cokrlic Jr. said.

On a recent Friday afternoon at the shop, the Cokrlics were slammed for Lent, the phone ringing again as soon as they hung up. I paid $2.50 for one traditional slice while the men buzzed around the kitchen.

“Six cuts of Altoona. You got it. About 15 minutes,” Cokrlic Sr. told a customer over the phone.

Unfortunately, I have the palate of a preschooler or one of the Step Brothers and while, yes, I could eat a pound of American cheese of any color, I wouldn’t dare touch a green pepper or anything adjacent to a green pepper. Still, it’s one of the classic ingredients of the Altoona pizza and for the sake of journalism, I slid the slice toward my wife, Anna, and picked her brain.

She’ll eat anything, even Altoona pizza.

“It seems like something you would cook up if you didn’t have a lot of ingredients laying around,” she said after a few bites. “It’s a really thick, soft bread and the salami makes it saltier than your average pizza. The pepper and the salami give it a hoagie element.”

Her final verdict: “I see how people could think it looks a little unappetizing but, ultimately, it was tasty, especially for a road trip.”

I scraped off some peppers but, alas, it all tasted like green peppers to me. Cokrlic Jr. did offer to make me one without peppers but I passed. Customers, he said, have made far stranger requests.

“We had a guy come in two weeks ago and he wanted a burger between two slices of Altoona pizza and he said it was awesome,” he said.

Cokrlic Jr. said the original Altoona-style pizza was made at the Altoona Hotel, just a few blocks away. Advertisements for the hotel in the 1950s only described the pizza as “home made,” but a 1996 blurb in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said it served a “unique pizza.”

The hotel burned down in 2013, but Cokrlic Jr. said there’s still a handful of shops that make the pizzas. It remains one of their best sellers.

“It’s unique,” Altoona resident Tracy Hoffman said in the shop. “I remember the hotel had it, and then I hadn’t had it in like 30 years until they started serving it here.”

The key ingredient, Cokrlic Jr. said, is the dough.

“To get it right, it has to sit for a day,” he said. “So you have day-old dough, green peppers, salami, and yellow cheese. It’s a good, yellow American cheese. We don’t use cheap American cheese.”

If this isn’t selling you on the 235-mile drive from Philadelphia, Altoona Mayor Matt Pacifico said the city is also known for its “Horseshoe Curve,” a railroad engineering marvel built in 1854 that’s now a National Historic Landmark. The 220-degree arc, still in use today, was so unique and vital to the U.S. steel shipments that Adolf Hitler sent saboteurs to try to destroy it.

“As far as the pizza, I think it’s super cool that we have a regional style of pizza and people either love it or hate it,” he said. “I happen to be a big fan of it, but I don’t get it with salami or green peppers.”