For those who grew up in the D.C. area, especially in Prince George’s or Montgomery counties, this is pizza: the kind you ate after Little League games, on dates in college or on nights when you just didn’t feel like cooking.
It arrives on what looks like a cafeteria tray, accompanied by a trowel-shaped spatula. Cheese and sauce run straight to the edge of the square sides of the pizza, which is barely a half-inch high and cut like a tic-tac-toe board. A thick, cup-shaped pepperoni sits atop each of the nine slices, holding drops of glistening oil.
For those who grew up in the D.C. area, especially in Prince George’s or Montgomery counties, this is pizza: the kind you ate after Little League games, on dates in college or on nights when you just didn’t feel like cooking. Maybe you went to Pizza Hut to redeem those “Book It!” rewards, or you lived close enough to a Domino’s for your family to be lured by the promise of 30-minutes-or-less delivery, but in the suburbs, there were always local pizzerias serving pies that seemed, well, different from what came out of the ovens at the national chains.
Ledo Pizza opened in a shopping center in Adelphi in 1955, founded by first-time restaurateurs Bob Beall and Tommy Marcos. They hit on a formula — a thin, pastry-like crust, smoked provolone cheese and a sweet, yet oregano-heavy marinara sauce — baked in rectangular pans, not round because that’s what the owners had access to. Those ingredients became staples, despite the fact that, as Ledo president and chief executive Jamie Beall explains, “A Ledo pizza is basically a bunch of mistakes.”
Bob Beall, a former restaurant liquor inspector, and Marcos, a deputy sheriff, “didn’t know a lot about pizza,” the younger Beall says, laughing. “My grandfather went to a baker down the street and the baker said, ‘Okay, here’s how you make a pie crust,’ meaning not a traditional pizza pie, but a regular pie. He went to another chef for a good marinara sauce, and it was a sweeter one. He used provolone because it was readily available at the time. He didn’t know it was supposed to be mozzarella. The thick pepperoni is basically because we had lazy cooks. When you told somebody to slice up six logs of the pepperoni, the thicker they cut them, the faster the job went.”
Ledo, located about a mile west of the University of Maryland’s campus, became a smash, drawing professional athletes, such as Joe Namath and Yogi Berra, as well as college students, local high school teams and families, to a wood-paneled dining room featuring College Park murals and framed photos of Terrapin sports stars. Lines were common, since pizzas were made to order.
Italian White Pizza at Ledo Pizza. (Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)
The restaurant’s success spurred similarly shaped and tasting pizzas to propagate across the area, largely in a swath of inner suburbs from Hyattsville to Rockville: Italian Inn in Hyattsville, Pizza Oven in Riverdale and other locations, Leonie’s in Langley Park, Continental in Kensington, Stained Glass Pub in Wheaton, 4 Corners Pub in Silver Spring, the Cavalier (later Gentleman Jim’s) in Twinbrook and eventually Gaithersburg. Those who couldn’t make pizza got creative: In the 1980s, before Ledo opened franchise locations, restaurants as far afield as Burtonsville were “importing” whole pizzas from Ledo’s, The Washington Post reported, if not just purchasing the recipe wholesale.
Restaurants, of course, don’t serve carbon copies. Today, the pies at Stained Glass Pub arrive with a ridge of bubbles and char around the edges, as opposed to the flat-sided Ledo, while Gentleman Jim’s defaults to Swiss cheese, rather than provolone. But due to its role in the origin story, the archetypical Ledo cheese pizza became the basis of Maryland-style pizza, and despite the scoffing of transplants from other parts of the country, it is definitely a unique style. “Not everyone likes Ledo’s pizza,” former Maryland delegate Tim Maloney wrote in a 2005 appreciation for The Post, “but you discover quickly that these people are from New York and New Jersey, so their pizza opinions really don’t count.”
“I would think we would be a contributor-slash-template” for the style, Beall says. “There were some good people who — I don’t want to say knocked off — but kind of took some of what we did and made it their own.” The geographic designation is relatively recent: Back in the 1980s, Phyllis Richman, the longtime Post restaurant critic and longer-time Ledo fan, referred to Ledo as “Prince George’s County pizza” in print and, in a different story, wrote, “This unusual pizza, with its flaky crisp crust and intense tomato and cheese topping, has become Prince George’s County’s finest culinary symbol.”
Ledo began offering franchise opportunities in 1989 and there are now more than three dozen outposts of the restaurant in the D.C. suburbs. But Marylanders’ affinity for Ledo (or, as many call it, Ledo’s) is fervent, bordering on fanatical — similar to their affection for Old Bay — and knows no state boundaries. When a new franchised Ledo opened near Daytona Beach earlier this year, Beall says, for the first few weeks, “a majority of the people that came in had Maryland socks on, or a Baltimore Orioles T-shirt or a Ravens hat. I think they wanted to show they were from Maryland when they came to the restaurant.”
In September 2022, Ledo planted the Maryland flag in the self-proclaimed pizza capital of the world, opening its first shop in Midtown Manhattan. Beall says the store is doing well, and he gets a kick of out New Yorkers’ reactions. “People are not necessarily turned off by the square pizza itself, but they’ll come in and grab a slice. They start chewing it, they look at you and go, ‘It’s not pizza. It’s really, really good, but it’s not pizza.’” Except they’re wrong: It is pizza. it’s our pizza.
Where to enjoy Maryland-style pizza
Continental Pizza
Open since: 1967
Continental, which operates out of a small shopping center along busy Connecticut Avenue in Kensington, is a throwback in every sense. The decor is spartan: backlit menu boards, wooden tables, no TVs. A handwritten sign by the register reminds customers transactions are “CASH ONLY.” The hardest drink poured is grape soda. And a plain pizza starts at $11.20. Most people who walk through the door are getting food to go: pizzas or cheesesteaks, which are cooked on a flat top grill behind the counter.
If you don’t order ahead, you’ll wait about 15 minutes for a pie, which arrives in a box wrapped in aluminum foil. The crust has more of a yeasty, sourdough quality than others, with a slight rim at the edges. It’s not as buttery as some Maryland pizzas. But with salty cheese and flat pepperoni, it’s a fine example of the style. A large is 10 by 14 inches, and yields 12 pieces. Pro tip: If you want some atmosphere, get your pizza to go and take it over to BabyCat Brewery, a short drive away, where you can pair your pie with classic lagers or a smooth, hazy IPA.
10532 Connecticut Ave., Kensington. continentalpizzakensington.com.
Stained Glass Pub
Open since: 1973
A true neighborhood hangout, the Stained Glass Pub draws crowds for its weekly events — Wednesday karaoke, Thursday trivia — as much as its food. At the comfortable wooden bar, where the TVs show football, baseball and the Maryland Lottery’s Keno game, teachers sit elbow-to-elbow with building contractors, beers and giant metal trays of pizza in front of them. The pies have more of a crust than Ledo — we’ve actually seen some charred, bubbled edges — and the kitchen is heavy-handed with the toppings, especially the cheese. For pizza fans, the best nights to visit are Monday and Tuesday, and not just to watch ESPN: Pizza is half-price with a beverage purchase. Less than $12 for a two-topping pizza big enough to feed the whole crew? Sold.
12510 Layhill Rd., Silver Spring. stainedglasspub.net.
Ledo Pizza in College Park
Open since: 1955. In this location since 2010.
No, this restaurant, formerly known as the “Original Ledo Restaurant,” is not the original home of Ledo. After 55 years on University Boulevard in Adelphi, the Original Ledo Restaurant closed and moved to downtown College Park in 2009. Owner Tommy Marcos Jr. decided to retire in 2020, and sold the business to a hospitality company that operates other Ledo franchises. The restaurant reopened in October 2021 after a significant makeover. Located just off the main drag of Route 1, the restaurant gleams, with large red-and-black booths and a good-sized bar. Photos from the old days at the original location hang on the walls.
There are plenty of touches to remind you that you’re in a college town, including photos of the Maryland flag rippling down a student cheering section and a basketball behind the bar autographed by coach Kevin Willard next to Maryland football helmets, but for those who remember the days of legends like Lefty Driesell or Morgan Wootten popping in for a pizza, the atmosphere feels a little generic. (Not that the sports heroes have disappeared: When I spoke with Beall for this story, he’d just had lunch with former Maryland basketball star Steve Francis at the Ledo in College Park.)
And on game days, alumni and students stream into the building — Ledo lies between campus and Sorority Row — to order the classic pizzas, which come with 9, 20 or 30 square slices, with a buttery, sometimes greasy crust. Beyond cheese and pepperoni, Beall says the other best sellers for the chain are meat lovers, veggie lovers and, believe it or not, Hawaiian. Ledo is served at more than 120 franchise locations up and down the East Coast, but College Park remains its spiritual home.
4509 Knox Rd., College Park. ledopizza.com. Other locations in the D.C. area.