At Paulie Gee’s Slice Store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the basic New York Metropolis pizza is king. “Pizza Cognition Principle states that the pizza you may have first is the pizza that tastes finest to you for the remainder of your life,” says proprietor Paul Giannone, aka Paulie Gee. “And that was that New York slice that I had again in 1958.”

The day’s work at Paulie Gee’s begins at 6 a.m. with the making of each Sicilian and basic pizza doughs. Sufficient dough for roughly 85 Sicilian pies and 230 New York-style spherical pizzas is made, divvied up, kneaded, and proofed each morning. After, dough made yesterday is fashioned into the day’s pies and the sauce — a easy mixture of tomato, onion, and garlic simmered for an hour and a half — cooks.

Although Paulie Gee’s Slice Store and its elements might learn as easy, each element, from the oiling of the pizza pans to the sorts of benches used for the cubicles, has been thought of. “As soon as I bought the concept to open this place, I made a decision that I used to be simply gonna be a basic slice store,” Giannone says. “It began with what the place was gonna look [like].” The basement panelling partitions, beverage dispenser, and pink benches that make up the cubicles are all akin to these you’ll discover within the New York slice retailers of the ’70s.

“Do I make the perfect pizza within the metropolis? That’s not for me to say,” Giannone says. “I make basic pizza… I needed to make that my distinctive model.”

Watch the total episode of Eater’s new sequence Icons: Pizza to learn the way Paulie Gee’s has made its title as a legendary New York slice store.