Something like South Shore Bar Pizza has been baking in Baltimore for 82 years

It turns out that Matthew’s Pizza, Baltimore’s oldest and most famous pizza shop, has been serving a pizza pie distinctive to the region of Massachusetts where I grew up — a fact that occurred to me only recently. 

That I failed to recognize a Matthews Pizza as a South Shore Bar Pizza is possibly due to the fact that Matthew’s is not a bar. It’s a simple pizza parlor (with a license to sell beer and wine) on Eastern Avenue near Baltimore’s Patterson Park, and that’s roughly 400 miles from the South Shore of Massachusetts and the city where bar pizza is said to have originated — Brockton, home of the Cape Cod Cafe on Main Street.

I know the Cape Cod Cafe and recall its round, pan-baked pies with a crispy, slightly burned rim — minimal, almost no crust — topped with tomato sauce and cheese that seemed to have been broiled into the dough. The pies were personal size and served on cardboard plates. Take-out orders were wrapped in paper.

This is pretty much what happens with Matthew’s pizza pies in Baltimore. They sell a traditional tomato pie without cheese; a pie with grated reggianito (the Argentine version of Parmigiano Reggiano) or one with mozzarella. Served on cardboard, wrapped in paper to go.

These days, Matthew’s has a far more extensive menu than when I first visited the place 40-plus years ago, after I moved to Baltimore from New England. But their main dish is pizza.

My first bite of a Matthew’s pie on a winter day was outstanding and memorable. But, because it was being served in Baltimore, I did not recognize it as a cousin to the pizza from the Cape Cod Cafe. 

Dave Portnoy did, however.

“This is a South Shore Massachusetts bar pie,” the founder of Barstool Sports declared last winter, as he sampled a freshly-baked pizza on the sidewalk outside Matthew’s. “It’s a bar pie, a good one.”

Portnoy rated it 7.9-to-8.1 on a scale of zero-to-10.

Kerry Byrne, a food writer whose South Shore Bar Pizza page on Facebook has more than 86,000 followers, listed 21 characteristics of the bar pie, among them: It’s always a personal 10-inch pizza, cooked in old steel pans, and usually with cheddar cheese. 

That last fact stopped me. Being of Italian-American ancestry, I find cheddar-on-pizza hard to swallow. Then again, when it’s Friday night after a hard week, and you want a cold beer and a hot pizza, you’re not about to send the pie back to the kitchen because it comes with something other than mozzarella.

Not on the South Shore anyway.

“When we go to a local bar, and we’re drinking Budweiser and watching the Bruins, we want a bar pizza,” Byrne told Boston magazine [expletives deleted] a couple of years ago. “We want American cheddar on a piece of dough, and we want to stuff it down our pie holes.”

That could be another reason I missed the relation between South Shore bar pizza and Matthew’s. It was an Italian immigrant named Matthew Ciociolo who established the pizzeria here 82 years ago; he never would have put cheddar on a pizza. His Old World standard holds to this day, based on what I just sampled.

So, acknowledging our differences without judgement, I hereby declare Matthew’s of Baltimore a distant cousin of the South Shore Bar Pizza. “Alla famiglia!”

I’ll be on the South Shore again in April to perform my one-man play, “Wicked Good: A South Shore Anthology,” at East Bridgewater Junior-Senior High School. All proceeds benefit a local scholarship fund. Details and ticket information.