Nobody searches pizza near me and gets sent to Midwood. Di Fara sits on Avenue J, deep in south Brooklyn, roughly an hour from midtown on a train that spends most of that hour above ground going slowly through neighbourhoods you have never had a reason to look at. That distance is not an obstacle to be minimised. It is the most interesting part of the day, and treating the trip as the event rather than the overhead is the difference between a good afternoon and a long commute for a slice.
An hour each way only makes sense if the rest of the block is worth your time too, and on Avenue J it very much is. Ask Karpo what else is worth stopping for between the station and the counter so the trip pays for itself twice.
Why the pizza is made the way it is
Domenico DeMarco opened Di Fara in 1965 and made the pizzas himself, one at a time, for the better part of six decades until his death in 2022. The family has kept the operation going, and the method has not been industrialised, because the method is the product. Pies are built individually, cheese is grated and torn on top of each one, basil is cut over the finished pie with scissors, and olive oil is poured over it at the end from a can held high enough to be visible from the queue.
This is inefficient on purpose and it explains the wait. A shop making pies one at a time cannot serve a crowd quickly no matter how large the crowd gets, so the queue is a function of the process rather than of the popularity. Understanding that in advance removes most of the frustration — nobody is going faster, and the wait is not a sign of disorganisation.
The result is a pie that is genuinely different from the modern Brooklyn pizzeria consensus: darker, oilier, more aggressively cheesed, with a crust that carries a real char. Some people find it too much. That is a legitimate reaction to a style that predates the current preference for restraint, and it is not the same argument as whether the place is good.
Avenue J is the actual destination
Midwood is a residential south Brooklyn neighbourhood with a large Orthodox Jewish population and a commercial strip along Avenue J that has almost nothing to do with the Brooklyn people photograph. There are bakeries, appetising shops, kosher butchers, judaica stores and a level of ordinary daily commerce that has been almost entirely renovated out of the northern half of the borough.
That is what makes the trip worth it. You get off an elevated train onto a street where nobody is performing for visitors, walk a few blocks past shops selling things to the people who live there, and eat at a counter that has been doing the same thing since the sixties. It is one of the more genuinely unreconstructed stretches of New York City still operating in plain sight.
One critical piece of planning: this is a heavily observant neighbourhood, and much of Avenue J closes early on Friday afternoon and stays closed through Saturday. If the walk around the street is part of the plan — and it should be — a Sunday through Thursday visit is the one that works. A Saturday trip gets you a much quieter street than you were expecting.
Ordering, waiting, and the square question
The round and the square are different products and the choice is not obvious. The round is the classic and the one most people come for. The square has a thicker, more bread-like base, holds more cheese and takes longer to come out, and people who go regularly are split fairly evenly on which is better. If there are two of you, ordering one of each is the only sensible resolution.
Whole pies and slices run on different rhythms. A slice can appear faster or much slower depending on where the current pie is in its life; a whole pie is a known quantity but a bigger commitment. For a group of three or more, the pie is almost always the better call — you wait once instead of repeatedly.
Bring cash even if cards are accepted, keep expectations about the seating low, and do not arrive fifteen minutes before you need to be somewhere else. The one reliable rule of this place is that it does not run on your schedule.
Building the afternoon around it
The version of this trip that works is: take the train down, get off a stop early and walk the last stretch, spend half an hour on Avenue J before you eat rather than after, then join the queue. Doing the neighbourhood first means the wait feels like the end of an outing rather than the whole of it, and it means you are hungry at the right moment.
Afterwards, the walk back to the elevated platform through the residential side streets is quietly one of the nicer twenty minutes in the borough — detached houses, front gardens, almost no traffic, a version of Brooklyn that most visitors never see and would not believe exists.
Practical notes
Di Fara is on Avenue J in Midwood, deep south Brooklyn, roughly an hour from midtown Manhattan on an above-ground train. Pies are made individually, so the wait is structural rather than occasional — allow far more time than the distance suggests and do not schedule anything tightly afterwards. Order a round and a square if there are two of you, and take a whole pie rather than slices for a group of three or more. Visit Sunday through Thursday if you want the surrounding commercial strip open, since much of Avenue J shuts from Friday afternoon through Saturday. Check current opening days before travelling, and bring cash as a fallback.
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Ask Karpo first
An hour on a train is only worth it if the whole street delivers, not just the counter at the end of it. Ask Karpo what else is open on the block on the day you are going, how long the wait usually runs, and what the return trip looks like once you are done.
