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Street Food Home

New York City

Dollar Pizza

Dollar pizza occupies the liminal space between street meat and indoor food. While it's made and sold in permanent structures, it might as well be street food, as hardly anyone eats a slice where they bought it.

There's a reason for the New York fold. The pizza is made so that you can pick up the slice with one hand, fold it lengthwise, and get a more manageable sort of calzone that you can eat while walking.

The dollar slice is not a meal. It is, however, substantial enough to tide you over for a while, like the length of the subway ride from Times Square up to 181st in the Bronx. Two of them makes a good lunch for most folks. Three of them would get me through the rest of the day to dinner. Any time I can fill up for three bucks, I'm interested.

One particular dollar pizza joint got a fair amount of my business. They were located about two blocks from where I worked, which put them just at the edge of the five block no-eat zone around Times Square. These guys, however, were hard-working immigrants (not gonna identify from where) who turned out honest value for the price.

You walked past a parking garage on the corner, up a cross street, and there was a door, often with a line out it, squeezed in between the garage and the bougie sandwich place on the next corner. Past that door was a narrow space three pizza ovens wide and just deep enough to shoehorn a prep area behind the two ovens, visible through the space where a third would have fit if it wasn't stacked with pizza boxes, a glass counter for the register and pizza case, and a customer space two drinks coolers long. A shelf, chest-high on the average human, ran down both sides, wide enough to hold a paper plate with a slice, but standing there to eat meant blocking progress if the place was crowded. Get out of the way.

For a dollar, cash, you got a reasonably sized freshly-made cheese slice. Protocol was, you had your money in your hand, and when you got to the counter, you held up fingers, and told the guy, two, to go, or whatever. He handed you your slices, and you moved down to the register and handed your cash to the next guy. Behind him, two more guys were shoveling pizza in and out of the ovens as fast as it would bake. Another two stood in the prep area, making pies.

One or two slices, if you got it to go, they shoved the paper plate into a paper bag, and you risked the cheese and sauce ending up on the paper instead of the crust. Three or more and they grabbed a box off the pile. Trick being, if you get one or two, order for here, and just juggle the plate, or fold your slice and toss the plate like a New Yorker. If you want to take it back to the office, get three, so you get a box. It's easier to carry, and if it's too much, you already have something to carry it home in.

If you wanted something more than cheese on your slice, you could ask for it, and they'd throw it on and toss your slice back in the oven for a minute. But that meant you standing in the tiny space the other side of the register, where you weren't quite Out of the way, and getting the stinkeye from folks trying to get their slice and move on. And let's be real, a reheated slice with thrown-on toppings is garbage.

You should have just got a cheese slice like everybody else.