Pizza Wagon

"To me this is everything good about the classic New York slice. This is what an NYC pizzeria should feel like."

You can order straight from the window on the sidewalk, which is half the appeal — you do not have to commit to sitting down to get a slice in your hand. Inside, the chairs and tables are that classic seventies style and they are still the same ones after all these decades. That is not a renovation choice, it is just what happens when a place is good enough that nobody sees a reason to change it.

Do not come here looking for fancy specialty slices. Your options are square, round, pepperoni, and a few rolls — chicken, sausage. That is the menu, and that is the point. Go in, order slices, stay and eat, or keep walking down 86th Street with them.

My mother and my uncles used to stop here on the way home from work as teenagers, when they worked on 86th Street just around the corner in the sixties and early seventies. Decades later my uncle still talks about it, and still makes a point of stopping in before he drives back to New Jersey.

The square is what they are known for — the Sicilian, properly cooked, with enough sauce and cheese to matter and none of the doughy heaviness that ruins a bad one. But do not skip the round: the plain slice here is as good an argument for the classic New York slice as you will find in Brooklyn.

Beyond that: pepperoni, and the rolls. Chicken roll or sausage roll if you want something other than a slice. The short menu is the whole personality of the place.

Pizza Wagon opened on 5th Avenue in 1966 and has been family owned and operated ever since — it says so on the marquee, in bulbs. The awning calls the place “A True Bay Ridginal”, which is the kind of pun a neighborhood earns rather than buys, and the window is currently carrying a 60th anniversary sign: 1966 to 2026.

The boxes keep score too. An older one reads “Serving Bay Ridge For Over 55 Years”; the current one says 59. Sixty rolls around this year.

The hours are the quiet luxury here: open until 1am, seven days a week. This is a late slice as much as a lunch one, and one of the few places on this list you can plan around without thinking.

Bring cash. It has long been reported as a cash house, and while that can change, cash is the safe assumption at a counter like this one.

It is also stop four on the Bay Ridge pizza crawl, two minutes on foot from Mancini's — so it slots neatly into a longer walk down 5th Avenue if you are making a day of it.