Wikipedia says that as of 2007, there were 34 pizzerias in NYC using some variant of the name "Ray's", based on a telephone directory search. A few years ago, I did a similar search and found 47 entries. As of that time, these were the names and numbers: Famous Original Rays Pizza (12 locations), Original Ray’s Pizza (4), Ray’s Pizza (13), RayBari Pizza (5), World Famous Ray’s Pizza (4), Famous Rays of Greenwich Village (1), Original Rays Pizza (1), Ray’s Original Pizza (1), Best Ray Pizza (1), Ray’s Pizza Restaurant (1), Rays Pizza (1), Ray’s Pizza and Bagel Café (1), New York Rays Pizza (1), and Ray Bono Pizza (1). There was once (but apparently no more) a place in Brooklyn called “No Ray’s”.
I believe that the Ray's in the Phoenix area are/were affiliated with one of the NYC Ray's. However, the one in Scottsdale is no longer a licensee. I visited the Scottsdale Ray's store with my son about a year ago and started up a conversation with the manager about the relationship with the NYC Ray's. He told me that they had gotten a divorce. When I pressed him for details on what brought about the divorce, he said that, like a real divorce, he did not want to talk about it. He ultimately loosened up when we got to talking about pizza and we had a nice chat. I guessed correctly about the ingredients used in their NY slices, and how the pizzas were made, but we did not get to talk about a Sicilian style. It was quite funny because I had a hard time convincing the manager that I was not in the business (and never was) and that I was not trying to get information out of him to reverse engineer his pizzas. To convince him that my interest was purely a hobby, I gave him the forum's URL and my forum name.
Peter
