Larry Olmsted

Special for USA TODAY

The scene: Geographically located about halfway between New York City’s thin crust tradition and Chicago’s signature deep dish version, Buffalo, N.Y. has its own less famous, but no less delicious, take on the pizza genre. And while there are a handful of spots renowned for Buffalo-style pizza, none is as famous as Bocce Club, a beloved local institution. A post-war success story, the location literally hosted a bocce club, a members’ spot for playing the Italian bowling game, when veteran Dino Pacciotti returned from service and added a pizza oven in 1946 (interestingly, Buddy’s, the most famous Detroit-style pizzeria, similar to Buffalo-style, still has a bocce club and two courts). The original location on Hopkins Road moved to a larger space in 1959, on Bailey Avenue near the University of Buffalo campus in Amherst, N.Y., a nearby suburb, keeping the name Bocce Club.

After the invention of the city’s most famous food, the Buffalo chicken wing, which has become a pizzeria staple throughout the entire region (including the original spot where it was invented, the Anchor Bar, which first served pizza), Bocce Club opened a second location in Williamsville, N.Y., another nearby suburb, in 1988. Both are owned by Pacciotti’s son, and are most popular for a very brisk takeout business to this day. The flagship Amherst, N.Y. spot has a faux Mediterranean villa exterior, with arches and mustard colored stucco, and looks a bit like a catering hall. While focused on orders for consuming elsewhere, there's a small eat-in area around a shelf-like counter, plus four red picnic tables outside under an awning. You order at the counter, behind which is an open kitchen bustling with pizza ovens and a never-ending process of folding cardboard pizza boxes. The indoor space is small, and the walls are covered with articles about the place and its unique take on pizza (and its wings).

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Reason to visit: Buffalo-style pizza

The food: Buffalo-style pizza is most similar to that of Detroit, which is sort of a thinner version of New York’s thick Sicilian. The base is hefty enough to be considered thick crust, but not nearly as heavy or bready as the slab that underlies Sicilian, or as casserole-like as Chicago’s. It’s medium thick, but unlike Detroit, is done in large round pies like New York thin crust. At Bocce Club, these pies are cut using a long, two handled arced blade, sort of a scimitar, but only in one direction, and the result is pieces in the form of strips of irregular length. It is certainly distinctive, and instead of a large and small, as most pizzerias offer, there is whole or half, which means you get exactly the same pizza in either size, whereas smalls can suffer from a different texture crust. On the other hand, you miss out on one side of the exterior crust, the best part. Bocce Club also offers half-baked pizzas to-go, for finishing in the home oven. Delivery is available throughout Buffalo, N.Y., or overnight across the country.

In Buffalo, white pizza is extremely popular, and because there is a long Catholic tradition here, this may be tied to Lent, when on Fridays many families order white pizza instead of the city’s most popular style, pepperoni. Buffalo’s pepperoni is slightly thicker than in most places, and cooked more, with the result that it sort of curls up into a saucer shape, crispy with a bit of oil in it, what is locally known as “cup and char” pepperoni. It has more flavor than the bland flaccid disks many pizzerias across American now use. Bocce Club makes its own hand-stretched mozzarella cheese and batches of secret pizza sauce daily. Workers wear T-shirts that on the back read, “We never had to change our recipe because our recipe never sucked.”

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The sauce is unusually and distinctively sweet, and the cheese is more flavorful than most pizza mozzarella. The dough is very light and airy given its thickness, and the outside crust edge is significantly crisper than the base, as is the mozzarella cheese near the outside edge. This makes outer pieces even more desirable than usual — while interior bites are just good, exterior bites are delicious, the highlight of Buffalo-style.

Bocce Club pizzas are best washed down with the city’s offbeat signature beverage, Loganberry fruit drink. A cross between blackberry and raspberry flavor, Loganberry was the favored libation at the now defunct Crystal Beach amusement park on the shores of Lake Erie, and while the park is gone, the name lives on as the most popular brand of Loganberry, widely available in the region.

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Just about every pizzeria in Buffalo serves wings, and this is where most locals get their poultry fix. Bocce Club serves traditional Buffalo-style wings, fried and rolled in a hot sauce and butter mixture, but it is better known for its barbecue wings, which many consider among the best in a town where myriad wing flavors vie, and barbecue is second in popularity to the original. Called jumbo wings, they are certainly plump and meaty, but the barbecue sauce is just so-so. They are served with a tub of Ken’s Buffalo Bleu Cheese processed salad dressing, a step down from the dip offered at wing specialists like Anchor Bar, Duff’s or Bar Bill. The wings at Bocce Club are decent, and worth having if you are not making another stop, but it is the pizza that warrants a visit.

What regulars say: “Chicago’s got deep dish, New York has thin crust, but we are sort of in the middle, with a perfect ratio of dough to sauce, and Bocce Club is one of the best,” says Mary Roberts, executive director of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House, a major Buffalo attraction.

Pilgrimage-worthy?: Yes for pizza fans trying to sample America’s regional styles, or for any pizza lover already visiting Buffalo.

Rating: Yum! (Scale: Blah, OK, Mmmm, Yum!, OMG!)

Price: $$ ($ cheap, $$ moderate, $$$ expensive)

Details: Original, 4174 North Bailey Avenue, Amherst, N.Y.; 716-833-1344; bocceclubpizza.com

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Larry Olmsted has been writing about food and travel for more than 15 years. An avid eater and cook, he has attended cooking classes in Italy, judged a barbecue contest and once dined with Julia Child. Follow him on Twitter, @TravelFoodGuy, and if there's a unique American eatery you think he should visit, send him an e-mail at travel@usatoday.com. Some of the venues reviewed by this column provided complimentary services.