There are five Joe's Pizza counters in New York City and people talk about them as if there is one. That confusion is worth clearing up, because the experience of eating a slice at the original on Carmine Street and eating the identical slice under the Broadway sign in Times Square are not the same thing at all, and only one of them is worth planning around.
Four of the five Joe's counters sit in completely different neighbourhoods with completely different queues, and the Broadway one is a tourist bottleneck at the exact hour the Carmine Street one is calm. Ask Karpo which counter near you has the shorter line right now.
The original and the three-door move
Joe Pozzuoli opened the first shop in 1975, having come from Naples, and the Greenwich Village location is the one everything else descends from. The detail that trips people up is that it is no longer on the corner where it started. The original stood at the corner of Bleecker and Carmine; a rent dispute in 2013 moved the business three doors down to 7 Carmine Street, where it has been ever since.
This matters if you are following an old article or an old photograph. The corner storefront in most of the famous pictures is not the shop. The current one is small, plain and a few paces east, and it is the correct address.
The Carmine Street shop is also the one with the most consistent product, for the straightforward reason that it turns over the most pies per hour of any of them and a slice that has been sitting is a worse slice. Volume is quality control in a slice shop.
The other four, and what each is for
There is a location at 150 East 14th Street, one at 1435 Broadway in the Times Square area, one at 124 Fulton Street downtown, and one at 216 Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. The pizza is made the same way at all of them and the differences are about context rather than recipe.
The Broadway shop is the one to be careful about. It is the highest-traffic location, it serves the largest share of people who have never been to any of the others, and at peak it can have a queue that makes no sense for a $4 slice. If you are in Midtown and hungry, there is nothing wrong with it; if you have made a trip specifically for Joe's, it is the wrong door.
The Bedford Avenue shop is the useful one late. Williamsburg keeps later hours than the Village and the Bedford counter is a genuinely good end-of-night option that far fewer visitors know about. Fulton Street serves the financial district lunch crowd and empties in the evening, which makes it the quietest of the five after six o'clock.
What to order and what it costs
A plain cheese slice is $4. Pepperoni and specialty slices are $5. A whole eighteen-inch pie runs between $24 and $28 depending on toppings. Those are real slice-shop prices in a city where a lot of comparable places have drifted well past them.
Order the plain. That is not romanticism — the plain slice is what this shop is actually good at, and it is the one that has been referred to as the quintessential New York slice for thirty years. The crust is thin and it holds when folded, the sauce is more present than at most slice shops, and the cheese is not over-applied. A pepperoni slice here is fine. It is not the argument.
The one adjustment worth making is asking for it hot rather than reheated from the display. At a busy hour there is usually a fresh pie coming out and it costs nothing to wait ninety seconds for it. At a quiet hour, that request is the difference between a good slice and an adequate one.
How to time it
The Carmine Street counter is at its worst between roughly noon and two, and again late on Friday and Saturday nights when the Village empties out of bars. It is at its best mid-afternoon on a weekday, when the pies are still coming out steadily and there is no queue.
There is no seating worth the name at any of them — a ledge and a wall, at most. This is standing food and the correct way to eat it is out of the shop, folded, within about two minutes of receiving it. Carrying a slice home in a box is a category error.
If you want to make a route of it, the Carmine Street shop sits within a few minutes' walk of Bleecker Street, Father Demo Square and the rest of the West Village, which makes a slice a reasonable opening move for an afternoon rather than a destination in itself.
Why it became the default answer
Joe's occupies an unusual position: it is simultaneously the most recommended slice in New York and not the one most pizza obsessives would name as the best. Both things are true and they are not in conflict. It is the default answer because it is consistently good, cheap, open, and in the places people already are, and because it has been doing exactly the same thing since 1975.
New York Magazine has called it Best of New York and it turned up on GQ's list of the best twenty-five pizzas on earth in 2009, which is the kind of accolade that changes a shop's traffic permanently. The shop did not respond by raising prices past the slice-shop bracket or by opening thirty locations, which is most of the reason it is still worth recommending.
The right way to think about it is as the reliable version rather than the peak version. There are pizzerias in this city doing more interesting things with dough and fermentation, and they take longer, cost more and are often closed when you want them. Joe's is the one that is open, costs four dollars and is good every time.
Practical notes
Original at 7 Carmine Street in Greenwich Village, three doors from the pre-2013 corner site; other locations at 150 East 14th Street, 1435 Broadway, 124 Fulton Street and 216 Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. Plain slice $4, pepperoni and specialty $5, whole eighteen-inch pies $24 to $28. Ask for a slice off a fresh pie rather than a reheat. Carmine Street has the highest turnover and the best consistency; Broadway has the longest queue and the least reason to be in it; Bedford Avenue is the best late option. No real seating anywhere — eat it standing, folded, immediately.
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Ask Karpo first
Five counters across four neighbourhoods means the right Joe's is usually just the one with the shortest line near you right now. Ask Karpo which location is closest and moving fastest, whether a fresh pie is worth the short wait at this hour, and what else is worth walking to around the Village once you have eaten.
