Racanelli’s New York Pizzeria

We order 16″ chicken bbq mushroom.
Pricy, eat much tasty pizzas and there was barely mushrooms.
the chicken was deli style. Watery sauce.

I was thrilled to find some *actual* New York style pizza so close to home! The pizza is great and garlic knots are great — especially with some beer.
The only issue I’ve really found at both Racanelli’s I’ve been to (the CWE location as well) is that I have never waited less than 20 minutes for my order — even when just picking up a slice. :(
I’m hoping the wait times will improve because the pizza is great!

By far the best Pizza in U City. I live in Illinois, I wish this place was closer. Whenever I drive to my family in west county I make sure to stop by here and get a pie.
I am a vegetarian but I never eat plain cheese pizza but I do here. Great ingredients.
This place reminds me of trips to New York when I was a child. Yum. Walk down the street and get a slice. Hard to find in St. Louis.

I’m from New York so i could be biased haha. The pizza is cooked to a nice crispy-​ness. I will have to say that it’s very cheesy so you might like how much oil is on it. But it is too darn tooting good. By far the only pizza place i like around here

Awesome pizza! Highly recommend. It’s in a small little shop but it was excellent. We noticed it from the small outside seating they have. We’re just visiting from KC but would come back! Seriously good pizza.

Had a 14″ New York style pizza with my wife. Got it half and half. My half had pepperoni, Italian beef and bacon. Her half was pepperoni, artichoke hearts and mushroom. The pizza is phenomenal. Great taste and served hot and fresh.
Had the garlic knots as an appetizer. They were hot and fresh and were delicious. Served with a side of marinara which was very tasty.
The Big John’s wings were terrific. Not too spicy but just right for me.
The counter service was very friendly and we met the owner Lou who was very nice and sat and spoke with us about the area.
Overall it was a terrific experience.

Yuuuuuummmmyyyyy!!! They have great NY style pizza that tasted just like the NY style pizza I ate in New York City. Their pizza slices are HUGE!!! Go here if you want a day out in U City and looking for a quick tasty bite. I WILL BE BACK!!!

It was just like what I was looking for. I used to love the Sbarro pizzas when I was a kid in the mall and thats what this is. Tasted great with a crispy crust. Unlike two other reviewers the crust was not charcoal. The guy behind the counter might have a little bite in his tone but thats what makes it New York plus hes got the Loop children to deal with on occasion and like any godfather hes gotsta take care of his family.

This is like east coast, NY style pizza! The curst is thin and crunchy, the cheese just the right flavor. I had the tomato basil. It was really perfect! I also had a small house salad. It was not too small — just the right size actually. The house dressing was good too. The slices are HUGE! They are more like a typical slice and a half! I shared garlic knots. One serving is more than enough for 2 people. They were made fresh and were toasty hot when they got to our table.
There isn’t much seating but both the pizza and the service were quite fast. Everyone was quite friendly. If you are looking for an excellent slice at a reasonable price, this is your place! Manga!

We always get delivery, so I’ve never actually been in this location, but each time the pizza has been fast and delicious! The crust is definitely the best part if you like a little crisp to it. The pizza sizes are huge, a small can feed 2 people easily with leftovers.

Great pizza at the right place! I’m kind-​of learning about pizza, the New York way! Hey I love pizza no matter how its done as long as its not over or undercooked. Pizza by the slice was reasonably priced, since I don’t get hardly any toppings anyway. The food didn’t take that long as it didn’t appear to be microwaved (as I thought!). Again, cheers on bringing a new kind of place that takes snacking to a new level!

As a previous reviewer said, everything overcooked. Even crunchy, blackish overcooked. I had an Egglplant sub-​it was smallish, dried out and burned. Friend got a veggie calzone. Big mistake. Overcooked again, but stuffed with a mountain of cheese goo and no veges in sight. Threw much of it in the trash.

I went in because a couple of friends had told me it was a great experience– boy, were they wrong. The cashier was incredibly rude, and when I finally got fed up and asked for a manager, he told me that he WAS the manager. Great, out of luck. I still ordered two slices, and when I got them they were close to charcoal. I’ll never be going there again, and I seriously warn others not to either.
0 stars for service, and 0 stars for their product.

Racanelli’s was a staple of the Loop back before the Loop was poppin’. They got out just in time for the current revitalization. In their defense, that may have been because they had to vacate the old Market in the Loop, and not because they somehow thought that would be a good idea.
This new location is across the street and down some, on the same stretch of block that may have once housed a Streetside Records (or is this where the hat store was?), just east of the parking lot next to the Tivoli, which now costs money (pshaw!), and next door to a Chipotle.
Selling pizza by the slice, for pretty decent prices, I’m sure this place will be absolutely *mobbed* once the weather warms up some, what with all of the people on their way to and from whatever the rest of those new businesses are, Wash U student housing, the movie theater and what have you.
There was a line out the door when I was there yesterday, and it was literally like two degrees out. (Literally.) Because of the way the place is set up, there’s nowhere you can sit that’s not near the front door, and every time someone comes in and out you freeze your balls off, at least momentarily.
There’s only five or six tables total. Eating there is like being the one guy who dines in at a takeout Chinese joint, probably on a day pass from a local psychiatric institution intended to help ease the transition to some sort of independent-​living situation. Your best bet is to get carry-​out. You don’t want people getting the wrong idea about you.
I get La Pizza every now and again, but I would never claim to know much about NY-​style pizza, nor is it my «thing.» It’s definitely in my top five types of pizza. Someone from New York might scoff at the idea of being able to buy a decent-​quality slice of NY-​style pizza here in the home of provel cheese and Chinese food with white bread, but who cares what they think? Their opinion stopped mattering some time back during the Ja Rule era.
For my money, Racanelli’s is a pretty good example of the form. It’s got everything you look for in New York-​style pizza: slices cut bigger than you need them to be, so you have to fold it in half to eat it, even if you buy an entire pizza; cheese that’s an actual dairy product; and crust that’s ever so slightly charred at the edges, so as to appear authentic-​looking, and then a little bit too thin towards the center, so it gets soaked through with grease from the pepperoni.
Rarely will I eat a pizza without pepperoni on it, because this is America. I would never take a napkin and attempt to mop up some of the grease, which is delicious when it’s still in liquid form, nor would I eat pizza with a knife and a fork as if it were a steak.
My little brother is a big fan of mushrooms (no Terence McKenna), so we got pepperoni and mushrooms. This is probably not the best «flavor combination» in the world, and the mushrooms didn’t really taste like shit to me. Racanelli’s is not the kind of place to go to get a pizza with fancy-​shmancy ingredients, with weird-​adjective descriptions on the menu. Those mushrooms probably came from a can.
But you don’t go to Racanelli’s to get a pizza topped with the kind of shit Rawse has to eat now that he has Type 2 diabetes anyway. («Shout out to all the pear.») My meal at Racanelli’s was easily worth the few dollars it set me back, even with those EBT salad bar mushrooms.
I look forward to returning when it’s warm out and I’m too «lit up» to even know what I’m eating. I’ll just get whatever’s sitting there in the warmer and then douse it with another two dollars worth of pamesan cheese, like Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing. Hopefully they don’t call the cops on me.