Recommending Joe’s feels like recommending water.
What I wrote thereFold it away
I know. Recommending Joe’s feels like recommending water. It’s the slice that shows up in every guidebook, the one with the Spider-Man plaque, the one with a line out the door at 2am. And I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of energy over the years trying to find a slice that would let me stop recommending it. Something cooler. Something with a story only I knew.
I failed. Every time.
The plain slice at Joe’s, the one at 7 Carmine Street, is an uncomplicated masterpiece. Thin, foldable, a little grease pooling in the cheese, sauce that actually tastes like tomato instead of sugar. It comes out of the case fast and you eat it standing up at the counter because there’s nowhere to sit, and that is part of the point. The whole pie runs about twenty-eight bucks if you want one, but nobody comes here for a whole pie. You come for one slice, maybe two, folded and inhaled on the sidewalk.
A slice costs a few dollars, and yes, the price has crept up over the years like everything else in this city. But it’s still the most honest four-ish dollars you’ll spend downtown. If there’s a better plain slice within a ten-block radius, I’ve yet to find it, and believe me I’ve tried to.
A couple of caveats. Cash makes your life easier here, the line at peak hours is real, and there is no romance to the room. It’s a counter. That’s the whole experience. If you want to sit down with a glass of wine and a candle, keep reading, because Greenwich Village has that too, and those are the spots people skip.