In Providence, Thanksgiving Comes on a Pizza

The day before Thanksgiving, most of the lines you see around the country are at grocery store checkouts, as people hurry to pick up last-minute ingredients. But if you walk down Wickenden Street in Providence, Rhode Island, on the third Wednesday in November, you’ll see a line of hungry customers down the block waiting for the mo

Every year, for one day only, Fellini’s Pizzeria offers its famous Thanksgiving Pizza, topped with classic items from the holiday dinner table. Unorthodox among both pizza parlors and Thanksgiving celebrations, the unusual combo has inspired cult devotion, pre-orders months in advance, and annual crowds, who jostle for one of the coveted slices.

FTA-—To make this iconic holiday feast of a pizza, the pizzeria bakes a whole wheat crust with mozzarella, then tops it with a layer of mashed potatoes, a pound of freshly house-roasted turkey, dollops of stuffing, and a generous splash of gravy. Customers can (and should) add cranberry sauce. As someone who has personally sampled this limited-time treat, if given the choice between one of Fellini’s pies and my actual Thanksgiving dinner, I’d take the pizza without a second thought.

Fellini’s has been a fixture on Providence’s historic East Side since 1989, turning out solid New York-style pizza most days. The Thanksgiving special came about 17 years ago, when owner Kristy Knoedler had a quandary familiar to anyone who celebrates the holiday: what to do with all the leftovers (after you’ve already made one beautiful, perfect leftovers sandwich). So she took them to work, and she got creative.

“I had leftovers at my house from Thanksgiving, and I brought all my leftovers in and made the staff a leftover pizza, and it was incredible,” Knoedler told The Providence Journal in 2022. “So we’re like, ‘All right, we’ve gotta do this,’ and we did it the following year.”

In the beginning, Fellini’s offered only 20 or 30 of the Thanksgiving Pizzas, but then word got around. Now, the pizzeria and its sister location in nearby Cranston serve about 2,000 of them, moving the festivity from a leftovers extravaganza to the day before the holiday. Pies go for $47 each.

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