The dollar slice is over. 2 Bros raised its price from $1 to $1.50 across its shops in March 2023, and the St Marks Place original — the one that started the whole thing — was the last holdout in Manhattan before it followed. Three years on, $1.50 to $2 is what cheap pizza costs in this city, and it is still, by a wide margin, the best value food available at two in the morning.
Cheap pizza in this city is a moving target — the price changed, the branches keep different hours, and the good ones are not always the nearest. Ask Karpo which counter near you is open and worth walking to.
What actually happened to the price
The $1 slice held for well over a decade, which in a city where rent and cheese both move upwards every year was always a strange piece of economics. It survived on volume, thin margins and a business model built entirely around never changing the number on the sign.
Inflation in flour, cheese and labour broke it in 2023. The increase was small in absolute terms and enormous symbolically, and it was covered as a news story by outlets that do not normally write about pizza, which tells you what the number meant to people.
There have been occasional promotional returns of the $1 slice since — a delivery platform ran one across dozens of pizzerias in 2025 — but those are marketing, not a restoration. The real price is $1.50 and up.
What $1.50 buys you
A wide, thin, foldable cheese slice reheated to order under a deck oven or a salamander. It is not artisanal and it is not pretending to be: the dough is made in volume, the cheese is a blend chosen for melt rather than flavour, and the sauce is sweet and thin.
Judged on its own terms it is a genuinely good product. The specific thing this style does well is structure — a New York slice has to be foldable, hold together in one hand, and survive being eaten while walking. That is engineering, and the cheap shops are often better at it than the expensive ones.
The single most important thing you can do is ask for it fresh rather than taking whatever has been sitting under the lamp. A slice reheated properly is a different object from one that has been warm for forty minutes, and asking costs nothing.
How to order well
Two slices is the standard order and one is a snack. Add a fountain drink and you are still under six dollars in most shops, which is the cheapest full stop-gap meal in Manhattan.
Skip the toppings at this price point. A cheap plain slice is honest; a cheap pepperoni slice is a cheap plain slice with a compromise on it. If you want toppings, pay more somewhere else.
Take the plate. Folding a slice onto a bare paper napkin is how people end up with oil down a sleeve, and the paper plate is doing structural work.
Which branches and when
2 Bros runs several shops across the city, with the St Marks Place location in the East Village as the original and the most storied. Hours vary by branch and the late-running ones are concentrated where the late-night foot traffic is — the East Village, Midtown around the theatre district, and the areas near the big subway interchanges.
That variation is the reason to check the specific shop rather than the chain. A branch in a quiet residential stretch may close at eleven; the one on a nightlife block may still be selling at four in the morning.
The broader cheap-slice category has expanded well beyond one chain, and prices across it now cluster between $1.50 and $2. If the nearest counter has a queue out of the door at two in the morning, that queue is information rather than an obstacle.
One more piece of ordering technique: the reheat is the whole game at this price. A shop that keeps its oven busy and slides your slice back in for ninety seconds is selling a materially better product than one handing you a lukewarm triangle, and it costs the same. You can tell which is which from the pavement by whether the trays are moving.
The corollary is that the busiest counter is usually the best one. High turnover means fresher pies coming out rather than slices ageing under a lamp, which is why a queue at a cheap slice shop at two in the morning is a good sign and not a reason to walk on.
Where it sits in the city's food
The $1 slice was, for about fifteen years, the reliable floor beneath eating in New York — the thing you could always afford. Losing it changed something real about how the city works for people on low or irregular incomes, and that is why a fifty-cent increase generated the coverage it did.
The replacement floor is $1.50 and it is holding. Whether it holds for another decade is genuinely uncertain, and the shops that have kept the price closest to the old one have done it by keeping the operation as simple as possible.
Practical notes
2 Bros raised the cheese slice from $1 to $1.50 in March 2023, with the St Marks Place original in the East Village the last Manhattan shop to move. Expect $1.50 to $2 across the cheap-slice category now. Ask for a slice reheated fresh rather than one off the lamp; two slices and a drink is the standard order and lands under six dollars. Skip toppings at this price. Hours vary by branch — the late-running shops are on nightlife blocks and near major subway interchanges, so check the specific counter rather than the chain.
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Ask Karpo first
Cheap slice prices and closing times both vary block by block, and the nearest counter is not always the one still open. Ask Karpo which cheap slice shop near you is serving right now, how late it runs, and whether there is a better counter within a few minutes' walk.
