Review: Frederick’s Cugino Forno Serves Some of the Best Pies We’ve Eaten Outside of Italy

When you visit Frederick’s Cugino Forno, simply point to any one of the 11 featured pies on the menu and and you’ll instantly know why Yelp voted it one of the Top 100 pizza shops in the nation.

The aptly named eatery—which translates to “cousin’s oven” in Italian—is owned and operated by five cousins, including Pat Gio, Erin Yildrim, and Yilmaz Guver. They launched their first store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and have opened four more in the state since. After moving from North Carolina, Gio and Yildrim opened the sixth shop in the old Coca-Cola bottling factory in Frederick in 2017. The pizzeria now sells a whole lot of dough—somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 pies a month.

With its family-style picnic tables, self-serve herb and spice bar, stacks of paper plates, and Mutti tomato cans filled with plastic utensils, the space is casual and comfortable. It’s also a celebration of Italy with Ferrari and Maserati banners, Italian soccer jerseys, and Gio’s green Vespa parked on the patio, though the cousins are not from the country that invented pizza but from neighboring Turkey.

It was Guver who first fell in love with pizza when, during a 2010 trip to Italy, he visited the famed L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele in Naples (made famous by Julia Roberts’ pizza pilgrimage in Eat, Pray, Love). Guver liked the spot so much, he took a job there to learn the art and science of pizza-making.

Clearly, the budding pizzaiolo—along with his cousins, who did years of pizza research—was a quick study. At Cugino Forno, the oversized pies that arrive on large metal sheet pans are some of the best I’ve eaten outside of Italy, where my sister lived for 20 years. In the Neapolitan tradition, they’re cooked in a wood-fire oven at high heat over molten-hot, volcanic stones for about 90 seconds. The result is a properly blistered crust that’s airy and light and stands up to a layer of San Marzano tomato sauce and puddles of house-made buffalo-milk mozzarella. Most of the raw ingredients are sourced from the Boot Country, including double-zero flour from Piedmont and tomatoes from Mount Vesuvius.

Start with a basic margherita so you can best appreciate the high-quality ingredients (“This is how you can understand a good pizza,” says Gio), then move on to the sweet and spicy Napoletana, laden with spicy sausage, pepper, and cippolini onions.

The shop also carries three types of salad, vibrant with locally sourced vegetables, and a selection of house-made dressings. To complement the meal, there’s beer and inexpensive wine by the glass or bottle. And to add to the excitement, there’s an impressive spinning carousel-style freezer—designed by Ferrari, no less—filled with imported gelato that seems straight from the streets of Sicily, where the artisanal ice cream was purportedly perfected. The gelato is an excellent capper to a meal. But pizza remains the true star.

“Customers tell me it’s the best pizza they’ve ever eaten,” says Gio proudly. “That’s an important compliment, because it’s not likely that this is their first pizza. They’ve often been eating pizza for 25, 30 years—or even more.”

CUGINO FORNO: 1705 N. Market St., Frederick, 240-575-9903. HOURS: Sun.-Sat. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. PRICES: Pizza: $17.95-23.95; salads: $10.50-11.50; desserts: $5.50-6.50. AMBIANCE: Factory chic.