L&B Spumoni Gardens

"My sister comes here every time she visits Brooklyn from Jersey and takes pies home to freeze. That's how beloved L&B is."

This is a Brooklyn institution in the truest sense — friends and families have been coming here for decades, and the routine barely changes. You sit outside at the classic red tables, get squares from the pizza window, and go back for a spumoni or an Italian ice from the ice window. Or you skip the counters entirely, go into the restaurant, and order a nice chicken parmigiana like it's a Sunday.

My sister comes here every time she visits Brooklyn from New Jersey, and she doesn't just eat — she buys pies to take back over the bridge and put in the freezer. That is the measure of the place. Nobody freezes pizza from a spot they merely like.

The famous one is the upside-down Sicilian square: the cheese goes down on the dough first and the sauce goes on top of it, which is the reverse of how almost everyone else builds a pie. The cheese caramelizes into the crust instead of sitting on the surface, the sauce stays bright and a little sweet, and the bottom comes out crisp rather than soggy. It is the whole reason people argue about this place.

Then get the spumoni. The name is not decoration — the spumoni came first, and the pizza arrived later.

Ludovico Barbati arrived from Torella dei Lombardi in 1917. By 1938 he was selling spumoni and Italian ices off a horse and wagon, and in 1939 he bought a vacant lot on 86th Street to make them on site. That is the L and the B, and the horse-drawn carriage is still in the logo.

It stayed an ice and spumoni stand until the mid-1950s, when it grew into what it is now — a spumoni factory, a pizzeria and a luncheonette sharing one corner. The pizza that the place is famous for was, in other words, the second act.

It is really three operations on one lot: the pizza window, the ice window, and the sit-down restaurant. You can do all three in one visit and most regulars do. The outdoor tables are the point in warm weather and they fill up on summer evenings — expect a crowd, and expect it to move.

Unlike a lot of the old-guard places on this map, L&B keeps long hours seven days a week, so it is one of the easier institutions to actually get to. Whole pies travel well, which is a thing worth knowing if you are coming from out of town.