The Kings of the Dollar Slice Build a Better Pizza

It’s hard to nail down the most improbable thing about Upside Pizza, a new slice joint a few blocks from the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Is it that the cooks make fresh mozzarella in the basement every morning, and that the mozzarella is just one of four cheeses on the plain pie? Is it that the chief pizza maker, Noam Grossman, positions batches of dough in front of the closed-circuit camera when he goes home at 1 a.m. in order to wake at 4 a.m. to see how much they’ve risen?

Or is it that they refuse to put a shaker of garlic powder on the counter alongside the red pepper flakes and the oregano, denying New Yorkers the right to customize their slice?

“I respect the garlic powder,” Mr. Grossman said, looking pained. “But that’s just not what we’re trying to do here.”

What Mr. Grossman and his partners are trying to do at Upside Pizza, which opened in January on Eighth Avenue at 39th Street, is to approach the New York City slice joint with the same culinary rigor associated with top-flight chefs and white-tablecloth restaurants. (In that world, the chef decides how much garlic is enough, and only garlic in its natural form would be used.)

The most improbable thing about it all is the fact that Upside Pizza is owned by the same Brooklyn natives — the brothers Eli and Oren Halali — who own the 2 Bros. dollar-slice pizza chain, prized by New Yorkers, commuters and tourists for the cheapest, fastest lunch in the city.

“The late-night slice near Port Authority is something I’m very familiar with,” said Mr. Grossman, 27, who grew up in Englewood, N.J., about an hour away by express bus. The Halalis were raised in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, then a longtime Italian-American neighborhood and still home to a few classic pizza joints, like the Original and Lenny and John’s.

“This was always the dream,” said Eli Halali, 36, gesturing at the slowly fermented dough balls, dollops of housemade sausage and freshly roasted mushrooms that make an Upside slice so different from the 2 Bros. one. The other big difference is the price: from $3 for a plain cheese slice to $5 for a Sicilian-style rectangle with pepperoni.

“The dollar slice is a business slice, nothing wrong with that,” said Anthony Falco, the baker who helped put the artisanal pizza at Roberta’s in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the map.

But the brothers, who are passionate about pizza, also craved respect for their product, he said. “They made the cheapest slice, and they wanted to prove they could make the best slice.”

They recruited Mr. Falco, who is now a freelance pizza consultant, to engineer the upgrade from the good-enough 2 Bros. slice to the best-in-show Upside slice. They invested more than $50,000 in a top-of-the-line gas oven (the standard 2 Bros. model costs less than $15,000), switched from basic canned tomatoes to a premium California product called Tomato Magic, and stocked up on extra-virgin olive oil.

They sought out “Supreme Special” pepperoni, made by the Ezzo company in Columbus, Ohio, because it has no fillers and excels at forming the “roni cups” that pizza lovers are currently swooning over, especially on Instagram.

“The slices are just the right size, and they use a natural casing,” Mr. Grossman said. When the casing shrinks in the heat of the oven, it pulls up the sides of each slice, forming a little meat cupful of spicy oil.

They even agreed to a truly impractical project: developing a dough supply using only natural leavening.

Like artisanal bread bakers, who recreate premodern techniques, Mr. Falco prefers naturally fermented starters to commercial products like active dry and instant yeasts, which are effective, but formulated primarily for speed and consistency, not flavor and texture.

The starter he deployed at Upside is three years old and has been nourished by the airborne yeasts of 10 nations, gathered by Mr. Falco in his work as a consultant. He frequently travels to places like Bangkok, Kuwait and São Paulo to advise entrepreneurs on how to recreate New York-style pizza.

Because a natural starter produces dough that is both more flavorful and more unpredictable than a yeast dough, it is a far less commercial choice. But once the Upside team committed to it, Mr. Falco taught Mr. Grossman the intricacies of leavening, the role of salt and heat, and the necessity of adjusting one’s internal clock to the pizza’s life cycle.

“Dough time is not the same as human time,” Mr. Grossman said.

In the last five years, New York pizza — thin-crusted but not cracker-crunchy, smoothly coated with tomato and cheese, sold by the foldable slice — has become a grail object for a small cadre of pizza fanatics. At places like Williamsburg Pizza in Brooklyn and Scarr’s on the Lower East Side, bakers have embraced the mission of perfecting and elevating the New York style, making their own sauce and cheese and even, at Scarr’s, milling flour in the basement.

It is another chapter in the long and winding story of New York pizza. That story begins around 1900, and fortunately each new episode has left artifacts behind. From the venerable Lombardi’s, said to be the first pizzeria in the United States, to the recently opened specialists in Detroit-style, bar-style and grilled pizza, New York is currently a rich cross-section of pizza evolution.

Last fall on the website Serious Eats, the New York pizza historians Ed Levine, Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener announced a “new golden age” for New York-style pizza, with a list of 27 supporting slices. Asked to define a New York slice, Mr. Wiener said it must be baked at 500 to 600 degrees, topped with crushed tomatoes and mozzarella (most likely the low-moisture kind, which melts), and emerge thin and foldable.

“Everything else is debatable,” he said.

The team also did a thorough re-examination and retelling of the history of New York pizza, in which they dismissed many long-held myths — and apologized for having repeated them as fact in earlier narratives.

Here’s a primer: First there were classic coal-oven pies made by arriving Neapolitans, topped with crushed tomatoes or anchovies and a dusting of cheese. Their successors adapted the formula by adding salt, garlic and herbs to the tomatoes, probably to compensate for the insipid tomatoes they found here. The gas-fired oven arrived, making it possible to cook pizza at a lower heat so it would emerge softer and last longer. (That’s how individually sold slices came to be).

Then there were the mass-production decades, the Brooklyn artisanal years, the quest to recreate the Neapolitan original, and now the reintroduction of the basic but perfected New York slice. (Not to mention the free-for-all that includes upside down pizza — cheese first, then tomato — grandma pizza, spicy pizza and a ham-and-pineapple fetish.)

Just this month, the narrative changed again when Peter Regas, a historian of Chicago-style pizza, produced evidence that a single baker, Filippo Milone, may have been responsible for three of the earliest pizzerias in New York: Lombardi’s, John’s of Bleecker Street and Pop’s in Red Hook, Brooklyn. (The first two are still operating.)

“You can’t imagine what a big deal this is,” said Mr. Wiener, apologizing for his scattered thoughts. He was scheduled to present his own recent research, drawn from Manhattan property records, the next day. “I barely slept last night.”

The advent of the dollar slice, around 2010, produced some new twists. The Halalis opened the first 2 Bros. in 2008 and soon expanded to Midtown, touching off a price war that brought a basic slice of pizza to an unheard-of low: $1.

Until then, according to an unwritten but unbreakable law of economics, a New York slice had long cost the same as a ride on the subway. (This Pizza Principle was first described in the 1980s; by 2002, the New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman noted that pizza prices had begun to outstrip fare increases.) By 2009, the fare was $2.25, and $3 slices were standard, sold everywhere from chain bakeries to corner delis.

The quality of the pizza, however, had not risen along with the price, Mr. Falco said.

“There was a lot of bad pizza out there, and it wasn’t cheap,” he said. Two Bros. and the other dollar-slice places, he said, “acted as a kind of centrifugal force on the world of New York pizza,” pushing mediocre, overpriced places out of the business.

Mr. Wiener agreed. “The dollar slice shook out some of the loose bits,” he said. “Places at the high price point with low quality didn’t survive.”

Still, he noted, making a dollar slice the standard lowered quality overall. “It changed New Yorkers’ idea of a what a slice should be,” he said. “And not for the better.”

As in the rest of the country, the spread of global chains like Domino’s and Papa John’s has helped kill off many independent slice joints.

What now remains is decent cheap pizza like 2 Bros., and excellent, relatively pricey pizza like Upside. The basic New York pizza lunch — two slices and a soda — is $2.99 at 2 Bros. and $7 at Upside, still cheaper than a poke bowl or any salad at Sweetgreen.

How do the two pizzas compare? A 2 Bros. slice is not exactly delicious, but it is good, hot and usually — because of the nine high-traffic locations selected by the Halali brothers — fresh. It’s uniform and predictable, tasting mainly of sauce, brought together by the rich texture of cheese and the bland crunch of crust.

But each bite of an Upside slice has multiple flavors and textures: Tang from the inside of the crust, smoke from the outside, funk from the caciocavallo cheese (alongside Parmesan, fresh and low-moisture mozzarella) and warm grassiness from the olive oil are just the start.

You wouldn’t know it, looking in from the street. Except for the guy in the window stretching crusts, Upside looks like a holdover slice joint from the 1990s. It has red- and pink-tiled walls and no seats — not the usual aesthetic for a handcrafted-food destination. (The partners are already scouting a new location with seating, in a more residential neighborhood downtown.)

Upside opened last month; at peak lunch time, there is already a line down the block. When a customer slips away from the bustle of Eighth Avenue and in the door, usually her first question is, “How much for a slice?”

“There is some sticker shock,” Mr. Grossman conceded. “I try to explain to them what we’re doing.”

Then he pointed out the window. “But there’s a 2 Bros. literally one block away.”

Upside Pizza, 598 Eighth Avenue (West 39th Street), (646) 484-5244, upsidepizza.com.