Totonno's

"They'd reach over to the basil plant sitting in the window, cut the leaves right off it, and put them on the pie."

My father worked for the phone company, and one of the jobs he caught was running the lines into Totonno's. He’d bring me along. What I remember most is the basil — no shaker, no garnish tray, just a plant sitting in the window that they'd reach over and cut from before the pie went out.

The other thing I remember is that they closed when they were done. Not at a posted hour — when the day's pizza was made and the dough was gone, that was it, and everyone still on the sidewalk came back another time. A hundred years on, they're still famous for it.

Antonio “Totonno” Pero opened this place on Neptune Avenue in 1924. He had come from Lombardi’s on Spring Street — the 1905 Little Italy shop generally credited as the first pizzeria in America — where he made coal-oven tomato pies wrapped in paper and tied with string. That makes Totonno’s one of the oldest coal-oven pizzerias in the country, and it is still in the founder’s family.

A plain pie. The oven and the crust are the whole argument here, and the margherita is the version that lets you taste both — thin, charred at the edges, with the char coming from coal rather than a gas flame. Whole pies only; this has never been a slice counter.

Check the hours in the box above before you make the trip. They are short, they do not cover the whole week, and they are pulled live from Google rather than typed here — because the one thing everyone knows about Totonno's is that the schedule is a suggestion. When the dough runs out, the door closes, whatever the clock says. Go early in the day rather than late.

Cash only. No reservations — you walk in or you wait. And it is genuinely far out: Neptune Avenue is at the bottom of Brooklyn, which is the whole reason it counts as worth the trip.