Mustard? Cumin? 3 ‘weird’ pizzas on a 23-mile bike ride in New Jersey

A pizza with a thin layer of brown mustard. A veggie pizza with cauliflower, peas, potatoes, paneer cheese and Indian spices. Another with mushrooms, honey and truffle oil.

New Jersey has lots of great independent pizza places, but we were on a quest for “weird” pizza (in the nicest way), a riff on my rides for “weird” beer. No sausage, pepperoni or green peppers this time.

And we were going by bicycle.

My two picks: Papa’s Tomato Pies in Robbinsville, which bills itself as the oldest family-owned and continually run pizzeria in the U.S. (since 1912), and relative newcomer Classico Tomato Pies in West Windsor, which opened 105 years later, in 2017.

We started our ride at in West Windsor’s Van Nest Park, which has its own claim to “weird” — the Martian “landing” in the 1938 radio version of War of the Worlds. We planned on 23 miles with 2 stops. (Here’s the route.)

After 10 meandering miles, we reached Papa’s, which always gets mentioned in a debate over the best pizza places in Central Jersey. (Trust me, you do not want to go down the rabbit hole of the Jersey Pizza Joints group on Facebook.) It also is the place that invented the mustard pie.

Mustard on pizza? Yup, it sounds weird, but NJ.com, perhaps the biggest news site in the state, ranked it New Jersey’s 9th-best pizza in 2024. (The No. 1 place has closed, so should this be the 8th-best?) And when we tasted it, we all agreed that it was delicious. A thin layer of brown mustard goes between the crust and the tangy tomato sauce and the cheese before it goes into the oven. And somehow they just complement each other. The mustard adds to an extra zing to the sauce.

You can see a bit of mustard peeking through the edge of the cheese here:

That tomato sauce? Delish.

And to think we almost missed out on it because we arrived just as they were supposed to open (no reservations taken, so we needed to beat the lunch crowd!) … and it was dark. Someone arrived to open up just as we were getting ready to head out.

All good. One 16-inch pie demolished, we got back on our bikes for another 10 miles.

I had thought about a taste-off between Papa’s and De Lorenzo’s Tomato Pies. (Its clam pie ranked 19th best on that NJ.com list). But it’s only half a mile away, and we needed to justify more pizza with some more miles.

Classico’s caught my attention for its Mumbai pie (100th on that same list). After all, who puts turmeric and cumin on pizza?

We are, however, talking about West Windsor, whose population is heavily South Asian. A couple of Classico’s regular customers suggested coming up with a pizza that leaned into that culture. And then helped them do it right, replacing mozzarella, for example, with paneer, a fresh, non-melting cheese used in Indian cooking. Cumin and turmeric are musts.

But then there also was a pizza that features mushrooms, honey and truffle oil. Not as unusual, but, heck, we were a large enough group that we could order 2 16-inch pies and not go into a carb coma.

So one with unusual spices and a play on Indian vegetarian dishes, the other with the luxurious smell of truffle oil wafting up and a touch of sweet from the honey when we bit in.

No tomato sauce on either one. The crust was definitely crispier than at Papa’s. We polished those off too.

Our order was unusual enough to catch the attention of Steve, the pizzaiolo, or pizza master, and he came over to chat with us. What a nice touch!

Maybe next time we should try dessert?

So which pie was best?

Honestly, we disagreed on that. But we did agree that they were all so different that you couldn’t really compare them.

One thing that’s cool is the common thread running between the two and De Lorenzo’s, and not just that they do tomato pies. The man who started Papa’s in Trenton taught many men who started their own pie places, including De Lorenzo’s, also in Trenton and which eventually split into two family operations. Steve worked for the one that moved to Hamilton (and was just closed for nonpayment of state taxes), not the one in Robbinsville.

So now you may be wondering: what exactly is a tomato pie, or is it just a different way to say pizza? I say tomato pie is a Trenton thing that has moved to the suburbs along with the Italian-Americans that once dominated the Chambersburg neighborhood. Philadelphians may disagree. But the main difference to pizza is that here the cheese, not the sauce goes on first.

I see a tomato pie ride in my future.