You might think New Haven, Connecticut, with a population of around 135,000, has all the apizza it needs. But don’t tell that to Chris Wallace, who opened Ozzy’s Apizza there last week after having success with the concept in Los Angeles County.

Wallace, a former stand-up comedian, was born and raised in Connecticut and moved to California following the death of his mother when he was 19, according to the New Haven Register. He also did a stint working for MOD Pizza before he started making apizza in his home kitchen.

“We sold pizzas on Saturdays out of my apartment,” he told the Register. “It was hysterical, it was smoky, it was nuts, it was not legal, but it was fun.” That eventually turned into Ozzy’s Apizza, planted in the outdoor courtyard of the Glen Arden Club in Glendale, California. It’s named in honor of Wallace’s beloved chihuahua and backed by co-owner Craig Taylor, also from New Haven.

Wallace and Taylor share a love for heavy metal, comedy and wrestling, but it’s their version of the crispy, thin-crust apizza—albeit fired by a gas oven instead of coal—that put them on the culinary map in Glendale, California. Despite Ozzy’s break from New Haven tradition, the Los Angeles Times listed Ozzy’s as one of the city’s 21 best pizza spots in 2023.

Dave Portnoy of One Bite Reviews also visited the Los Angeles spot and gave it a score of 8.1. “I really like this pizza,” Portnoy said. “I don’t know that I’d call it New Haven-style. This is, like, a really well-done pizza, but if I didn’t know his story, it wouldn’t jump out to me as New Haven….But for L.A., [it’s] pretty much as good as you can get. This is great.”

Patricia Kelly Yeo, food and drink editor of TimeOut, praised Ozzy’s Apizza in early 2024. “If you’re the type of person who turns up your nose at soft-centered Neapolitan pies, this New Haven-style pizza pop-up…just might make your ideal pizza,” she wrote. “Crunchy, light and extremely crushable, the whole pies at Ozzy’s Apizza…are a breath of fresh air in a new-school pizza scene dominated by Detroit-style squares and various styles of wood-fired thin crust pizzas.”

Wallace founded the New Haven location of Ozzy’s in part because he missed his family back home and grew tired of traveling back and forth from L.A. He also was following the advice of New Haven-style guru Colin Caplan of Taste of New Haven. “I never wanted one here because there are so many great places here—why do it?” Wallace told the Register. But Caplan pointed him to an empty space in East Rock Market, the former home of Panicale Pasta, and Wallace and Taylor ended up claiming the spot and opening the new Ozzy’s Apizza there just four months later.

Pizzas on Ozzy’s menu include a tomato pie called the Liotta (named for the late actor, Ray Liotta of Goodfellas fame) and the You’re Welcome, featuring fresh little neck clams, garlic, oregano, pecorino and olive oil.

“We’re just two New Haven guys who love our state and love the opportunity to come home,” Wallace said in the New Haven Register interview. “We’re not trying to be anyone (else); we’re just going to be Ozzy’s.”

After all, New Haven is already home to some of the country’s best-known pizza spots, like Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana and Modern Apizza. The city is so proud of its apizza that a delegation of Connecticut pizza makers, lawmakers and community leaders traveled to Washington, D.C. in May and gathered on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to proclaim New Haven “the pizza capital of the U.S.”

Ozzy’s will have plenty of competition, but the rivalry is an amiable one, according to Wallace. “I think what people don’t realize in the pizza community is that we all talk to each other, we’re all friends, and we all go through the same stuff. So that was why we came home.”