When I left my home state of Rhode Island at 18, it didn’t take long to discover that there was almost nothing about its local food customs that didn’t make outsiders laugh. That small children routinely bought coffee-flavored milk in school cafeterias; that “beer” was not pronounced with an “r” at the end, but pizza was; that a hot dog shortened to about four inches and topped with meat sauce is called a hot wiener, and that a counterman preparing six of them at a time may deploy a maneuver known as “wieners up the arm” — all of this apparently strikes people who grew up more than 20 miles from Providence as very funny.

When New Yorkers hear that Violet, a new restaurant in the East Village, serves a style of pizza that comes from Rhode Island, they start to smile, as if getting ready for the punch line. In fact, though, Violet’s pies are a homage not to the whole state but to a specific restaurant, Al Forno, in Providence. If you know one thing about Al Forno, you know that its pizza is not a joke.

One of the restaurant’s two founders, George Germon, originated the recipe in the early 1980s, more or less out of desperation. After failing to get an oven hot enough to produce a crust as thin and crunchy as the ones he remembered eating in Italy, he tossed dough on a wood-burning grill and watched in awe as it stiffened to a crisp almost instantly. The pizza he and his wife, Johanne Killeen, would develop and elaborate from there was in a category of its own. The skills required to bake dough in a pizza oven, whether it runs on gas, coal or wood, don’t apply to grilled pizza at all. This makes it an unending source of fascination to pizza technologists including Violet’s chef, Matt Hyland.

With his wife and business partner, Emily Hyland, Mr. Hyland paid tribute to wood-fired New Haven and New York pizza at his first place, Emily, then took on Detroit pan pizza at Emmy Squared. They have expanded both restaurants to new locations, including Citi Field, where Emmy Squared is now the “official pizza.” But Mr. Hyland has been a student of the Al Forno school of pizza for years, since going to college in Rhode Island. Violet, which he opened at the start of the year, is dedicated to the style. He has worked allusions to other features of the state’s cuisine into the menu, which makes forays into pasta and small seafood dishes, but the pizza grill is at the center of the action.