📍Best Pizza, New York City

Brooklyn Crawl: Stop 5

NYC's Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint sections are hyper-concentrated with great coffee shops, food, and bars. So when a friend visited from Los Angeles, I got the opportunity to revisit some favorites.

Stop 1: Sey Coffee
Stop 2: Win Son Bakery
Stop 3: L’industrie Pizzeria
Stop 4: TALEA Beer Co
Stop 5: Best Pizza
Stop 6: Cocktails

After the beers at TALEA it was time to get another slice. A coffee that started at around 10:30 a.m. has led to a 4:00 p.m. or so slice of pizza. It’s one of my favorite parts about New York — it’s very easy for one thing to lead into another. A short 5-minute walk was between us and pizza.

When you get to Best Pizza, it feels like the classic NYC slice joint. The pies are up front on the counter. The menu is short with just a handful of fairly traditional toppings. Best Pizza has been around for 10-12 years. It has looked like it’s much older from the day it opened.

There’s just a handful of seats inside with some lawn chairs outside. It’s an odd hour but most of the seats were empty. I found three guys behind the counter. One taking orders and talking to customers, a second prepping pies, and a third warming slices. Like any good NYC slice shop, it’s a crew that’s perfectly in sync and incredibly efficient.

Right after we ordered, a large group of people came in. Listening in on their conversation, we learned that they were tourists doing a self-guided pizza crawl. A few minutes later, a guy in a different group remarked to his friend, that he’s been excited to get pizza like this during his visit to NYC. Clearly, Best Pizza has a reputation as an exemplary NYC slice.

We got two slices, one each. This time my friend got the plain and I got the pepperoni. The reversal from L’industrie Pizzeria. We took the slices outside to enjoy. My friend dusted his with oregano. The crispy basil came standard on mine.

This slice feels like a classic NYC slice. The crust is thin with a slight crunch giving away to chew. When you fold it, it bends, making it easier to eat. The crust tears away rather than breaks. You can see the classic blister on my pepperoni slice. The sauce is sweeter than you’d expect. You can taste the oregano and basil in it. There’s enough cheese to get a pull but not enough to slide right off. The pepperoni here is thin and flat but huge. The circumference of the pepperoni is a departure from NYC norms but I would never complain that there’s too much pepperoni.

As our Brooklyn crawl was winding down, we had cocktails ahead of us. However, we didn’t go straight there. We had stop 5.5 on the way.

📍Best Pizza
33 Havemeyer St, Brooklyn, NY 11211