Rhode Island is one of the few places where "what kind of pizza?" is a real question, because the state runs three very different fires. Here's the short version.
Grilled pizza is the local invention, dough laid straight onto a hot grill, so the bottom chars and crisps and the toppings go on after the flip. It's thin, smoky, a little irregular, and it's a Providence original, pioneered here decades ago and now a regional signature. If you want the RI classic, that's the lane.
Coal-fired pizza bakes in a coal oven that runs even hotter than wood, pushing a distinctive char and a crackly crust. A few Providence spots do it well. It's closer to a New York coal-oven pie than to Naples.
Wood-fired Neapolitan, our lane, bakes fast in a wood-burning dome at around 900°F: a soft, airy crust with a blistered, leopard-spotted rim, eaten fresh and a little floppy in the middle. The fuel is oak or maple, not coal or gas, and the dough is naturally leavened and slow-fermented.
So which do you want? Craving smoky and thin with a char from the grates, grilled. Craving crackly and blistered from extreme heat, coal. Craving soft, fragrant, fermented dough with a puffy charred rim, wood-fired Neapolitan, which is what we do, with a few New England liberties (yes, the clam pie).
None of these is "better", they're different fires for different cravings, and Providence is lucky to have all three. We just happen to be obsessed with one of them.