Is Scarr’s the Best Pizza in New York?

Every conversation about pizza is a trap. Is thin crust better than tossed crust? Is pineapple an acceptable topping? Should tomato sauce be applied cooked or raw? Is it a margherita if the mozzarella doesn’t come from a buffalo? Is it O.K. to pass on eating the crusts? Is a starter-risen dough better than one made with commercial yeast? Is a coal oven better than a wood-burning one? Does California have its own style? Does Chicago-style deep dish even count as pizza? Many people claim to have answers, because everyone believes they’re a pizza expert—including actual pizza experts, who are nightmares. But there are no answers, only conflict, and the digging in of heels. The infinite variety of pizza beliefs is so universal that it slips into something almost Jungian, a window into the self and the shadow. The pizza of your childhood, the pizza of the place you consider home, the pizza that awakened you to the fact that pizza could actually be gastronomically magnificent—each is the best pizza in the history of the world, because it’s the history of your world. Tell me what you think is a perfect pizza and I’ll tell you who you are.

At eight-thirty on a recent Saturday night, the line for slices outside of Scarr’s Pizza—in a new location, which opened in July, across the street from the now closed original Lower East Side spot—ran up Orchard Street to the end of the block, where it turned west down Hester Street and ended in a churning knot of people joining and leaving, unsure whether the wait, and the pizza at its terminus, would actually be worth it. “Worth it” is one of those slippery concepts which plague our commodified, optimized lives. The poor soul at the end of the hundred-odd-person queue will pay $3.75 for his slice just like everyone else, with the added cost of an hour or so in line. But then there will be the slice itself: a large, tapering wedge, maybe dressed with rounds of pepperoni, or studded with sultry mushrooms, maybe just a pure and simple triangle of sauce and cheese. And it’ll be a Scarr’s slice—a legendary slice, an if-you-know-you-know slice, a slice that earns heart-eyes emojis when you post it on Instagram. Because Scarr’s is where you go if you want a slice that’s good—like, really good, like, “best slice in New York” good. Whatever “best” means. Whomever it means it to.

Is it worth it? I don’t know how to answer that question, and I’d be skeptical of anyone who claims that they do. All pizza is relative, New York pizza doubly so. Millions of words have been written and uttered on where to get a great slice in this city, ranking the best of the best, mapping optimal itineraries for crawls and tours. People have built entire careers on stating, with utmost confidence, that one pizzeria’s strikingly good slice is two iotas closer than another’s to the Platonic ideal. It makes sense that pizza is a topic of obsession: like all things of great simplicity, the smallest variations in approach have an outsized effect on the end result.

Here’s what I will say: any list of great pizza that leaves off Scarr’s shouldn’t be trusted. The restaurant’s slice is excellent, just this side of faultless. The crust is fantastic, light and a little bit tangy, with a sturdy bottom that gives over almost immediately to a springy interior. There are no puddles of grease, no bald patches of dough, no vexing bubbles or stray scorch marks. The whole thing has admirable structural integrity, succumbing neither to sag nor to sog. The sauce is bright and fresh—it can land a little bit flat, but it’s nothing that a hit of hot pepper can’t perk up. I can also tell you this: if you go to Scarr’s in the middle of the week, on the early side of the lunch rush, maybe while it’s raining a little, you’ll find that the line stretches just four feet out the door, so the question of whether it’s “worth it” doesn’t factor at all.

The restaurant’s owner and founder, Scarr Pimentel, grew up in Hamilton Heights, in a sprawling Dominican family; as a teen, he landed a busboy job at the celeb-magnet Nolita restaurant Emilio’s Ballato, where he started learning the basics of turning flour, yeast, and water into dough. He moved on to pizzerias—Artichoke Basille’s, known for its gargantuan slices, and Lombardi’s, arguably the birthplace of New York pizza—and began to refine his own sense of pizza perfection. Scarr’s Pizza opened in 2016, in a narrow sliver of a space with brown wood-panelled walls, molded Formica booths, and kitschy late-seventies ambience. It was a deliberate aesthetic, both a play to nostalgia and a subversion of it. Pimentel, a Black Latino man making moves in the overwhelmingly white pizza world, wasn’t paying homage to the pizzerias of his youth; he was claiming them.