The best pizza in Clifton, NJ — and how we back it up

A cheese pizza is how you judge a pizzeria. Anyone can hide behind toppings — wing sauce, breaded chicken, BBQ glaze. A plain cheese pie is just dough, sauce, and cheese, and you can taste every choice the kitchen has made. Ours holds up to that test, and here's what's inside it.

Start with the dough. We cold-ferment it a full 24 hours — high-gluten flour, water, salt, sugar, yeast, and olive oil, then time in the cooler. That slow ferment is what gives the crust its chew and its blistered edge instead of the flat, bready texture you get from dough stretched the same day it's mixed. There's no shortcut for it; it just takes a day.

Then the oven. Ours is a brick oven running at 550°F. That heat sets the crust fast, so the bottom crisps while the inside stays tender. The sauce is ours — San-Marzano-style crushed tomato, garlic, and oregano, cooked light so it still tastes like tomato. The cheese is low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella from a Wisconsin producer, which browns and pulls the way you want instead of going watery.

None of this is exotic. It's the un-cut-corner version of every step: real dough time, real oven heat, real cheese. That's the whole case for the best pizza Clifton has going.

A reputation isn't built on the cheese pie alone — it's built on the pizzas people order twice. These are the ones our regulars come back for, all halal, all baked in the same 550°F brick oven.

The Buffalo Chicken is our single most-ordered pizza — halal chicken with buffalo sauce and mozzarella. Right behind it is the Crispy Chicken Ranch, built on a breaded halal cutlet, and the one we point first-timers toward.

From there the list runs deep: Meat Lovers, BBQ Chicken, a Cheesesteak pie made with halal steak, White Ricotta, Three Cheese, Spinach & Feta, Hawaiian on halal turkey ham instead of pork, and the All The Way. And the one you won't find at most pizzerias — our Beef & Pine Nut, a Levantine-inspired signature of sautéed halal ground beef and toasted pine nuts that reflects the family who's run this kitchen since 1998.

Craft gets you a good first pizza. Consistency turns a first order into a standing one, and that's what 944 reviews and a 4.4-star average actually measure — not one great pie, but the same pie, right, over and over.

Part of it is that a family runs the place. It's not a rotating crew chasing a franchise checklist; it's the same people who've made this dough since 1998, which is why the crust tastes the same in July as it did in January. Part of it is that we deliver with our own drivers — no Grubhub or DoorDash markup between us and you — so a large stays hot on the run across Clifton, and pickup is usually ready in about 15 minutes.

And part of it is who can eat here. Because the whole kitchen is halal, a Friday-night order works for the whole table — the halal-conscious families of Passaic County and everyone else in Clifton, no separate menu, no asterisks. The pizza is the reason people come; the halal kitchen is the reason nobody in the group gets left out.

The fastest way to settle whether this is the best pizza in Clifton is to order one. We're at 600 Getty Ave, on the corner of Getty and Crooks — about a minute off Route 21, near Route 46 and the Garden State Parkway.

Order online at orderonlinemenu.com/alaeddinspizza or call (973) 247-9922. Pickup is free and usually ready in about 15 minutes. In-house delivery runs a $15 minimum with a $3 driver fee in Clifton — a little more into Paterson and Passaic — and Clifton orders land in roughly 25 minutes. Feeding a crowd? Ask about the 28-inch rectangular party pizza, one pie that covers 12 to 15 adults.

We're closed Mondays. Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday we're open 11:00am to 9:30pm; Friday and Saturday until 10:30pm. If it's your birthday, bring a photo ID and pick up a free personal cheese pie — same day, one per person a year, something we've done since 1998.