An unofficial United States food observance held each February 9 to celebrate pizza and share it with others.
“The day is real. Its origin story is a blank page.
No founder, proclamation, or first-observance record has been found for National Pizza Day. It is an undocumented American food day, carried each February 9 by pizzerias, brands, and the wider pizza industry rather than by any establishing act. The often-repeated claim that it began around 2000 has no source behind it.
Every February 9, pizzerias across America run the biggest single-day promotions of their year. Slices move, deals fly, and almost no one stops to ask where the day came from. The honest answer is that nobody knows. National Pizza Day has no founder on record, no proclamation, and no documented first observance. It is real, widely promoted, and completely undocumented at its source.
The day's backstory is a blank page. The pizza's is not, and it hides a far better mystery.
The most famous origin tale in food, that a Naples pizzaiolo named Raffaele Esposito invented the Margherita in 1889 for a visiting queen, is one food historians now think was probably invented in the 20th century to sell pizza. The same red, white, and green pie was already in print decades earlier. The royal "thank-you" letter does not hold up. The likely forgers were running a pizzeria.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Pizza Day ran on February 9. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
Pizza is not ancient. The flat, tomato-topped pizza we know emerged in the poorer districts of Naples in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the city's population had pushed past 400,000 and people needed food that was fast and cheap. The tomato that defines it was not even Italian to begin with. Encyclopaedia Britannica notes the tomato arrived in Italy as an early 16th-century import from the Americas. Pizza was street food for the working poor, eaten on the move, long before anyone thought to honor it.
Then comes the famous part. The story goes that in 1889 a Naples pizza-maker named Raffaele Esposito made a pie of tomato, mozzarella, and basil for Queen Margherita of Savoy. Those are the colors of the Italian flag. The queen loved it, the tale says, and sent a thank-you letter, and so the Margherita was born. It is told everywhere. It is also, by the best modern evidence, almost certainly untrue.
Food historians now treat the tale as folklore, and the case against it is detailed. An identical basil, mozzarella, and tomato pizza was already described in print in 1853, decades before the queen's supposed visit. The signature on the royal letter does not match the real handwriting of the court official who allegedly wrote it, and the kingdom's official gazette never recorded the visit at all. The hoax is widely pinned on a later pizzeria's owners, who are thought to have produced the letter to promote the business. Even Britannica now files the royal naming under "popular legend" rather than fact.
Pizza reached America with Neapolitan immigrants. Lombardi's in New York City, opened in 1905, is the spot most often called the first US pizzeria. That claim, too, has cracks. A 2019 records search by researcher Peter Regas credits the founding instead to Filippo Milone and shows Gennaro Lombardi only arrived in America the year before the shop opened. From those early storefronts the food split into American styles all its own.
The craft eventually won the recognition the food day never documented. In 2017 UNESCO inscribed the "Art of Neapolitan Pizzaiuolo" on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list. National Pizza Day, by contrast, has no such paperwork. There is no founder, no first February 9, and no record of why that date was chosen. The day lives entirely through promotion and habit, an honest blank where most holidays keep an origin.
TIMELINE
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
The day's energy comes from the market, not a monument.
Trade press describes February 9 as the pizza industry's biggest single-day food holiday, the date pizzerias save their year's marquee promotions for. The pull of the day is commercial, not commemorative, which is part of why it has no founder to point to.
Few foods travel from the slums of one city to a global cultural list. Pizza did. UNESCO judged the craft of the Neapolitan pizza-maker worth safeguarding for humanity, a rare honor for a dish that began as something the poor ate standing up.
Pizza is not a special-occasion dish in the US so much as a daily one. A federal dietary survey found that on any given day about 11 percent of Americans ate pizza, with children and teens eating it most.
BY THE NUMBERS
GOOD TO KNOW
The birthplace of modern pizza and the keeper of the strict original. A true Neapolitan pie is hand-shaped and slid into a roaring wood-fired oven, never a metal pan, and is made from a dough of only flour, water, salt, and yeast.
Home of the foldable thin slice, descended from the Neapolitan pizzerias that immigrants opened in the early 1900s.
Deep-dish pizza, created in 1943 at Pizzeria Uno, is a tall pan pie eaten with a knife and fork rather than by the slice.
World Pizza Day falls on the feast of Sant'Antonio Abate, the patron saint of pizza-makers, a separate international observance from America's February 9.
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Test your knowledge
No. It is an unofficial food observance, not a public holiday, so there is no day off work or school.
COLOPHON
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