Carroll Gardens

Carroll Gardens is named after something you can see from the sidewalk. When the blocks between Court and Smith were laid out in the nineteenth century, the surveyor gave them front yards far deeper than the Brooklyn norm — deep enough to hold a real garden rather than a stoop and a hedge. The result is a set of streets that feel measurably wider and greener than the neighborhoods on either side, and the name simply records the fact.

The rest of the neighborhood's character came later and from people: a dense Italian-American population, concentrated along Court Street, that gave the area its bakeries, salumerias and social clubs. A good deal of that is gone or going, in the ordinary way. Enough of it remains that the pizza question here is genuinely interesting.

Lucali, and what it decided not to do

In 2006, Mark Iacono opened Lucali in a former candy store at 575 Henry Street. It is, twenty years on, one of the two or three most argued-about pizzerias in the United States, and the reason is as much about the operating model as the pizza.

Lucali does not take reservations. It does not sell slices. It does not do takeout in the ordinary sense. It is cash only. It opens in the evening, and the line starts forming outside well before the door opens. There is one room, and the pizza is assembled in front of you on a marble counter.

Every one of those is a refusal. Each one is a way of declining to scale, and together they produce a place that cannot serve more than a fixed number of people per night no matter how much demand exists. In an industry where the default response to success is a second location, a delivery app and a slice window, Lucali's answer has been to stay exactly the same size.

You can find this admirable or insufferable. What is not really arguable is that it works, and that the constraint is the point rather than an accident.

F&F, and the opposite instinct

A few blocks east, at 459 Court Street, is F&F Pizzeria — and it is close to Lucali's inverse in every respect except quality.

F&F opened in 2019, from Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli, the pair behind Frankies 457 Spuntino. It occupies a converted garage wedged between their two other Court Street businesses. It is counter service. It sells slices. It keeps regular daytime hours, seven days a week. There is no line at four in the afternoon and no ritual to observe.

What it does sell is a New York slice made with an unusual amount of deliberation — the Franks reportedly worked on the crust with Chris Bianco and Chad Robertson, which is a fairly extraordinary pair of people to consult about a slice shop. The result is the everyday format executed at the level normally reserved for the sit-down one.

Two answers to the same question

Set them side by side and you have the clearest statement in Brooklyn of the two things a pizzeria can be.

Neither is the correct model. They are answers to different questions — the same split we lay out in the Brooklyn pie, explained, playing out three blocks apart. The fact that a neighborhood of this size supports both at a high level is the actual story here.

The line at the bottom of the hill

Carroll Gardens ends, to the south-west, at Hamilton Avenue, and Hamilton Avenue is under an elevated expressway. Cross beneath it and you are in Red Hook, which developed on a completely different trajectory for reasons that are almost entirely about that road.

That boundary is where Pizza Moto put its restaurant in 2015, at 338 Hamilton Avenue — described in different places as Red Hook and as Carroll Gardens, because it is genuinely on the seam. It is a five-minute walk from the Court Street spine and it feels like another borough, which tells you most of what an elevated highway does to a place.