Antonino's Original Pizza

Windsor-style pizza follows its own grammar, and Antonino's Original Pizza cooks straight to it. The house build starts with a thin crust baked on cornmeal, then layers on shredded pepperoni rather than sliced, whole-milk mozzarella from Galati Cheese, fresh-packed tomato sauce, bacon, canned mushrooms, and finely diced green peppers — a formula specific enough that a regular can place it from the first bite. The shredded pepperoni and the local mozzarella are the kind of details that separate a Windsor pie from a generic one. That construction is not a trend the kitchen picked up; it is a recipe the Ciaravino family has carried from its earliest South Windsor pizzeria to the current shop on Howard Avenue.

The specialty pies are where the menu shows its personality. The Angry Hawaiian stacks ham, pineapple, hot peppers, and double bacon, so the sweetness lands first and the smoke and heat keep it out of familiar Hawaiian territory. The Sicilian is the most direct bridge to the kitchen's Italian side, layering mozzarella, imported Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano Reggiano, onion, fresh garlic, sliced Roma tomato, olive oil, and oregano. The Shriveled Tomato concentrates double sundried tomato, fresh garlic, and Italian basil into a cheese pizza that leads with aromatics instead of a crowded topping list. For a first read on the house style, The Deluxe keeps it plain — cheese, sausage, mushrooms, and green pepper over that cornmeal crust — while Napolitana offers a cleaner, herb-forward contrast when a table wants a lighter reference point.

Around those headliners, the menu spreads wide. Meat-free tables have Peppe's Veggie and a Mediterranean Greek; a Quattro Formaggi and a Tuscan Chicken pull in other directions; and the kitchen keeps a Nutella dessert pizza and Sicilian cannoli for the end of a meal, along with an Original Pittsburgh Sandwich for anyone stepping off the pizza entirely. Beer is on hand, the pricing sits in the mid-range, and the pies are portioned to share — this reads as a family-order operation more than a solo-slice one, with the South Windsor shop opening daily at mid-morning and handling orders by location for the larger group pickups.

What the menu adds up to is a specialist that refuses to be narrow. The Windsor-style base never moves — the cornmeal crust, the shredded pepperoni, the local mozzarella are fixed points — but the specialty roster keeps testing the edges around that core. It is a kitchen confident enough in one regional style to keep building variations on it rather than chasing a different idea every season. The gluten-free crust comes with a plain caveat: it is topped in a shared kitchen where gluten is present, a caution the operation states outright rather than buries.

The through-line behind all of it is lineage. Antonino "Tony" Ciaravino opened the family's first pizzeria in South Windsor in 1959, early in the life of the city's now-signature pizza style. His son Joe Ciaravino carried the recipe forward, opening the first shop under the Antonino's Original Pizza name alongside his mother, Vita, in 1999 — the point at which the recipe and the current name lined up. The business has since grown to five area locations, with the Howard Avenue address presented as part of that founding story rather than a later franchise addition, and the menu still leans on the same construction Tony worked from.

The Ciaravinos keep a visible hand in the city beyond the counter. The business ties its name to community fundraising, most recognizably through a heart-shaped pizza campaign supporting the cardiac program at Windsor Regional Hospital — of a piece with the community-minded, welcoming reputation the place has built. Two generations on, the shop still carries itself as a South Windsor pizza name: the place a household reaches for on a Friday, working from a recipe it has kept since the style's early days. The heart-shaped pizza makes a fitting emblem — a Windsor recipe, shaped for a Windsor cause, sold by the same family that first started making it.