TLDR: After tracking ticket data across all four Brothers Pizza locations for a full calendar year, five pizzas account for 61% of all pie orders — and each one earns its spot for a specific, kitchen-explainable reason.

By Anthony Marino · Head Pizzaiolo, Brothers Pizza · Last updated May 22, 2026

People ask me all the time what the most popular pizza on our menu is. My honest answer is: it depends on the store, the day of the week, and whether the York Revolution is playing at home. But there's a consistent top tier. Five pizzas come up on nearly every ticket, every shift, at every one of our four locations — York, Gettysburg, Hanover, and McSherrystown.

This article explains what those pizzas are, why customers order them again and again, and what actually goes into making each one taste the way it does. This isn't marketing language. It's what I tell the 40-plus pizzaioli I've trained over the years when they ask why certain pies become regulars and others get dropped.

Context: How We Track What People Actually Order

We didn't set out to write a "greatest hits" list. What happened is simpler: I started paying closer attention to which pies generated the most reorders — meaning customers who ordered once, came back, and ordered the exact same thing. Novelty sells once. Consistency sells every Friday night.

Our York location on route 30 does the heaviest volume — we're going through close to 600 lbs of dough on a Friday night across all four stores combined. The McSherrystown location skews toward families; Gettysburg pulls a lot of visitors who are in town for the battlefield and want something fast and real; Hanover has the most loyal regulars, the kind of people who've been ordering the same pie for 11 years.

All four stores run the same core dough: a 72-hour cold-fermented recipe that we've kept consistent since we standardized it across locations in 2011. That dough is the foundation. Every pizza on this list lives or dies by it.

The Decision: Why These Five?

I looked at a full year of ticket data — not just unit sales, but reorder rate, table-return frequency, and which items prompted customers to mention the pizza by name when they called in. I cross-referenced that with what I hear in the kitchen and from the front-of-house staff.

I rejected a pure popularity-by-units approach because some pizzas sell high on Friday nights due to promotions, not because people love them. And I ignored anything that moved primarily because of a limited-time coupon. You can find our current deals at /brothers-pizza-coupons/.

The five pizzas below made the cut because they sell consistently across all four locations, they have high reorder rates, and people ask for them by name.

The Process: Breaking Down Each Top-Ordered Pizza

1. The Classic Cheese Pie

Reorder rate: 74% | Most popular at: Hanover

This is not a simple pizza to make well. It's the hardest. There's nowhere to hide.

Our cheese pie uses full-fat low-moisture mozzarella layered over a house-made tomato sauce built on crushed San Marzano-style tomatoes, salt, a small amount of olive oil, and fresh basil added after the bake. Nothing cooked into the sauce — that's a mistake a lot of shops make. Cooking basil into the sauce turns it bitter. We add it post-bake.

The dough goes into the deck oven at our Hanover store at 575°F. Bake time is 7 to 8 minutes depending on how the dough came out of the walk-in that day. Humidity matters. A dough at 38°F bakes differently than one at 44°F, and both are "refrigerator temperature." Our guys learn to read the dough by touch.

The result is a pie with a char-spotted bottom, a crisp-but-foldable crust, and enough structural integrity to hold a wide NY slice upright. That's the whole point of NY-style pizza — it needs to fold without collapsing.

Why it tops reorders: People who've eaten real NY pizza can taste the difference immediately. For a lot of our customers in York County, this is the closest thing to what they remember from visiting family in New York or New Jersey. That's not an accident. I learned this dough from my uncle in Brooklyn. We've been making a version of it for over two decades.

2. The Pepperoni

Reorder rate: 68% | Most popular at: York and McSherrystown

Pepperoni is the most-ordered topping in America, so it's not surprising that this pie sells. What's interesting is which pepperoni and how it's applied that makes ours perform the way it does.

We use a medium-cup pepperoni — not the flat, stamped-out kind you get at chain pizza shops. Cup-and-char pepperoni curls at the edges during the bake and holds a small pool of spiced oil in the cup. Each slice has crispier pepperoni edges and a slightly smoky, fatty richness in every bite that you don't get from flat slices.

We apply it in a single, full-coverage layer — not scattered. The idea is that every bite of pizza has pepperoni in it. Sounds obvious. A lot of places don't do it.

The pie gets a slightly longer bake than the plain cheese — closer to 8.5 minutes — to ensure the pepperoni edges crisp without burning the crust bottom. The dough can take it because of the fat content in the pepperoni slowing the heat penetration.

At our York location, pepperoni is the single top-selling pie on Friday nights, and by a wide margin. Youth league sports — and York County has a serious youth sports culture, as anyone who follows York's youth sports teams knows — drive big group orders. Pepperoni is the unanimous team vote almost every time.

3. The White Pie

Reorder rate: 71% | Most popular at: Gettysburg

The white pie divides first-timers. No tomato sauce is a dealbreaker for some people, especially those who've never had one. Then they try it and it becomes their regular order. That's exactly what the reorder data shows.

Our white pie uses a ricotta base — whole-milk ricotta applied directly to the stretched dough — with shredded mozzarella on top, thin-sliced garlic, and a finish of olive oil and fresh-cracked black pepper. Post-bake, we add a light dusting of pecorino romano and dried oregano.

The garlic is the critical variable. Too much and the pie is overwhelming. Too little and the white pie tastes flat — just cheese on bread. We go through a calibration conversation with every new pizzaiolo: three to four cloves per pie, sliced thin enough to caramelize in the oven without burning. Burnt garlic on a white pie is the number one failure mode.

At our Gettysburg location, white pie orders spike hard on weekends when we get visitors. A lot of them are from the Mid-Atlantic metro areas and they're familiar with white pies. It's also become the go-to for a lot of the locals who want something a little different for date night or a quieter dinner. If you're planning a night out after exploring downtown York or the battlefield area, this is the pie I'd steer you toward.

4. The Sicilian

Reorder rate: 63% | Most popular at: McSherrystown

Our Sicilian is a different animal from the round pies. It's baked in a rectangular steel pan, and the dough is roughly double the thickness — we proof it in the pan after forming, which gives it the open, airy crumb structure inside with a crisp, oily bottom crust.

The trick with Sicilian is the oil. The pan gets a generous pour of olive oil before the dough goes in. As the pie bakes, that oil fries the bottom of the crust. You get a crunch on the underside that's completely different from a deck-baked round pie. A lot of customers describe it as almost bread-like, but that undersells it — it's got a distinct, almost focaccia-adjacent character that holds up to heavier toppings.

We dress the Sicilian with a slightly thicker layer of sauce and cheese than the round pies, because the crumb needs something to stand up against. A standard amount of sauce on a Sicilian disappears into the thick crust.

At McSherrystown, the Sicilian slice is a lunchtime institution. We pre-bake full pans in the morning and sell by the slice. By 12:30 on a weekday, we're usually down to our last two or three slices. We've tried increasing volume. There's a ceiling — the pans take 22 minutes each, and you can only fit so many in the oven at once.

5. The Stromboli

Reorder rate: 66% | Most popular at: York

Technically not a pizza. But it comes out of the same dough, the same oven, and it's made by the same guys — so I'm including it here because the ticket data shows it competes directly with our round pies in the "what are we getting tonight" decision.

Our Stromboli is rolled dough stuffed with ham, salami, pepperoni, mozzarella, and provolone, sealed at the edges and baked until the crust is golden and the cheese is fully melted. We brush the outside with egg wash and add a light dusting of garlic powder before it goes in the oven.

The thing that separates a good Stromboli from a mediocre one is the seal. If the dough isn't crimped properly, the cheese leaks out during the bake and you lose moisture and flavor. We seal the edges with a fork press and make sure the seam side is down in the oven. It sounds simple. New guys mess it up constantly for the first few weeks.

The Stromboli at our York location sells especially well for pickup orders — it travels better than a pizza because it's self-contained. Families who know they have a 20-minute drive home order it intentionally. Our full menu, including the Stromboli, is at /our-food/.

What Real-World Experience Tells Us

After 22 years in NY-style pizza kitchens, the consistent lesson is this: customers don't come back for novelty. They come back because something was exactly right the last time.

The pizzas above aren't complicated. They're hard to execute consistently at volume. That's the difference. Making one perfect white pie on a quiet Tuesday is straightforward. Making 80 of them on a Friday night when your deck oven is running hot, you're two guys short, and a Delone Catholic graduation party just walked in — that's where training and systems matter.

Every person I've trained knows that our standards don't flex based on how busy we are. The dough fermentation doesn't care if it's a holiday weekend. The garlic on the white pie doesn't get a pass because the kitchen is slammed. That's the commitment that turns first-time customers into the people who've been calling in the same order for 11 years.

Common Mistakes (And How We Avoid Them)

Key Takeaways

Reorder rate matters more than first-order volume. The plain cheese pie isn't flashy. It's our most reordered pizza at Hanover because it's consistently perfect, every time.

The dough is the decision. We standardized our 72-hour cold-fermented dough across all four locations in 2011. Every single one of these top-five pizzas is built on that same foundation.

Cup-and-char pepperoni isn't a trend — it's a technical choice. The fat pool in each curl changes the flavor of every bite. Flat pepperoni can't do that.

High volume requires systems, not heroics. On a Friday night we're making hundreds of pies. The consistency people taste is the result of training and process, not talent alone.

Know your location's personality. Gettysburg orders white pies. McSherrystown wants Sicilian slices at lunch. York's Friday night is all pepperoni. Understanding that lets us prep smarter and serve faster.

Ready to taste the difference? See our full menu at /our-food/, check current deals at /brothers-pizza-coupons/, or visit us in York — we're open every day.