Traze
Pizza

Traze began as a pop-up in 2015, born out of owner Natalie DeSabato's desire to share a falafel pizza she had been testing and tweaking for years after moving to New York in 2011. Her Grandma Rose, who lived with the family in central New Jersey, always made her mother's simple pan tomato pie (with mozzarella) recipe for family parties. It was the only thing agreed to be delicious across all the family's generations at the party. While Natalie didn't use the same dough recipe — her grandmother's incorporated an egg — she found herself naturally gravitating toward that same pan pizza style.

By 2018, Natalie started renting her own kitchen in Long Island City, and Traze was no longer a side hustle; it had become her entire career. The pop-ups gave her the freedom to experiment, and over the years she became obsessed with creating new flavor combinations. During COVID, she even started shipping frozen, vacuum-sealed pizzas. Pop-ups remained her main focus, and breweries became some of Traze's biggest supporters. Fifth Hammer, just a few blocks from the kitchen, welcomed Traze every Wednesday for years and became an especially important part of the Traze story.

When the café where Natalie had worked for several years closed, she knew it was time to take Traze from pop-up to brick-and-mortar. She was already deeply rooted in LIC, so opening there felt like the natural next step. Traze opened in April 2025, and it's been incredibly gratifying for Natalie to watch something that started with a pizza she couldn't stop tinkering with grow into a place she gets to share with people every day. Some customers have been following Traze since the pop-up days, while others are families and neighbors who have discovered it since it opened.

Today, Traze has a little bit of everything when it comes to its customers. There are people who work nearby and stop in for the lunch special, locals who have their favorite staples, people coming from other boroughs specifically to try the more unusual slices, and plenty of customers who order delivery for a night in or while hanging out by the waterfront. The menu has grown to more than 20 flavor combinations, mostly because Natalie's biggest problem is that she has a hard time taking pizzas off the menu. She loves creating something new just as much as she loves seeing people get excited about it.