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This one is slow food.

Dom DeMarco makes the best pizzas in NYC. This might sound subjective, but it's basically incontrovertible now — he wins 'best pizza' award in every publication that looks into the question. He has for most of a decade.

He's 71, he's been making pizza pie for fifty years out in Midwood, an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Brooklyn half-way to Coney Island.

Three regular slices set me back 12 bucks. I sat down at a grimy table in a fluorescent-lit corner to eat them. The walls are darkened with dried pizza sauce droplets, and hung above the tables are many of the glowing write-ups of Dom DeMarco's pizza. I read a New York Times piece from 2004 while I ate:

I do this as an art. I don't look to make big money. If somebody comes over here and offers me a price for the store, there's no price. There's no money in the world they could pay me for it. I'm very proud of what I do. I don't have any employees; I use my kids.

I eat once a day, after I close. With wine. But I have one piece of pizza every day, to see if it comes out all right. Then, after I close, I sit down with my bottle of wine and I eat. When I eat, I like to sit down. There's no way I can sit down once I open the door in the morning.

Pizza has become considered a fast food. This one is slow food. Anything you do, when you do it too fast, it's no good. The way I make a pizza takes a lot of work. And I don't mind work.

The guy makes every pizza. You can wait for hours — on a Tuesday mid-afternoon I waited forty minutes just for a few slices (and you get what's available, which was sauce, three cheeses and thyme when I got mine).

A five minute video of an old guy making pizza pies is arguably as boring as it sounds. But this is exactly what it is like, and in person it's quite mesmeric.

Joseph | 30 Oct 2008