A great pizza can disappear in minutes. Getting it right can take years.
The 25-plus spots in Store Reporter’s Restaurant Discovery Guide offer plenty of opportunities to find the best pizza in Rockville, Potomac and North Bethesda. Here’s a taste of three of them.
The pursuit of pizza perfection
Getting the details right is an obsession for Richard Weiner of No Regrets Pizza Co. in North Bethesda (pies pictured above). Those details include ingredient ratios, temperature, fermentation time and handling. Each variable shapes the taste that comes out of the oven. “All these things have to hit right all the time,” he says.
Weiner, a mortgage broker without culinary training, built a full-sized brick pizza oven at his home and began crafting pies for family and friends. The reception was so enthusiastic that he decided to turn his passion into a business. In 2024 Weiner opened No Regrets, which makes handcrafted Neapolitan pizzas as well as rectangular Roman-style pies. The reviews speak for themselves.
“Some people do this as a business,” he says. “They’re constantly looking to make the process more efficient and cut costs. For us, it’s a passion project. We’re looking to make the very, very best pizza.”
A Pittsburgh recipe, a Rockville tradition
Giuseppi’s Pizza Plus, a Rockville institution since 1991, still retains its original old-school neighborhood vibe. The walls are lined with autographed pictures of local politicians and thank-you notes from Little League baseball teams.
Giuseppi’s offers New York-style pies and slices, but its origins are in Pittsburgh.
“I made my high school job my life’s work,” says owner Scott Feldman. As a teenager he worked at Mineo’s, a Pittsburgh institution that’s been serving pizza since the 1950s.
“I’m the only one they gave their recipe to,” Feldman says. “We never compromise the original formula. There’s no substitute for the best friggin’ ingredients.”
The Middle East’s answer to pizza
Brothers Danny and Johnny Dubbaneh left their corporate jobs in 2016 to sell manoushe at local farm markets, sharing the flavors and hospitality of their Middle Eastern heritage. In 2021 they opened Z&Z Manoushe Bakery, a permanent storefront in the very same space where their grandfather had run another restaurant decades earlier.
Manoushe gives pizza lovers a familiar starting point, with a base of hand-crafted flatbread that gets its flavor from a long fermentation process. The dough is cooked on a dome-shaped iron griddle and topped with fragrant ingredients like za’atar spices, olive oil, fresh vegetables, traditional cheeses and spiced meats.
The Washington Post just named Z&Z one of the 40 best restaurants in the DMV.
What separates a great manoushe from an ordinary one? “It’s the love that goes into it,” Danny Dubbaneh says.
A wider slice
These three restaurants are just a taste of our local pizza scene. Find the best pizza in Rockville, Potomac and North Bethesda with Store Reporter’s Restaurant Discovery Guide.
Not in the mood for pizza? Check out our Guide for all the new restaurant openings.
