Editorial policy

Money

No money changes hands between this publication and anything it covers. No sponsored articles, no paid placement, no affiliate links, no listing fees, no free meals, no press trips. There is nothing to disclose because there is nothing to disclose.

How a restaurant ends up on this site

A pizzeria is written about here if it explains something — a technique, a period, a change in the borough, a piece of the historical record. Not because it is popular, not because it is new, and not because a keyword exists.

This is why there is no "best pizza in Brooklyn" page and will not be one. A ranking would be a list of places we have not eaten at, ordered by other people's opinions, which is worth nothing to anybody. What we can do honestly is explain why Lucali refuses to scale, why a coal oven cannot legally be replaced, or why an elevated expressway determined the fate of one block on Hamilton Avenue.

Before a business is named, we confirm from at least one credible published source that it exists and what its current status is. That matters more than it sounds: during research for this site we found that a pizzeria widely described in older writing as a Greenpoint institution had, as of early 2026, changed its name and its purpose. Anything written from memory would have been wrong.

What we never publish

• Opening hours. They change constantly and we do not verify them.
• Prices. Same.
• Menus and dish lists as current information. We will describe what a place was reported to serve, attributed and dated, as history.
• Phone numbers, booking links or reservation details. Including historical ones — see below.
• Ratings or scores. We have not eaten the pizza. A score would be a fabrication.
• Invented quotes, dates, addresses, ownership or biography. Under any circumstances.

Where a piece of volatile information genuinely matters to a historical claim, it carries the date it was true and the source that recorded it.

First-hand reporting: there is none

This is the most important line in this policy. Nothing on this site is written from a visit. Nobody here has eaten at the restaurants described, interviewed the people named, or stood in the rooms.

So you will not find the words "we ate," "we visited," "our editors tried" or "on a recent Tuesday" anywhere on this site, because all of them would be false. Everything here is assembled from archives, documents and published reporting by people who were there, and it is attributed to them.

That constraint shapes what this site is good for. It is good at history, documents, mechanisms and context. It is not a review site and does not attempt to be one.

The Pizza Moto question

This publication occupies a domain formerly used by a business that still trades. We take three specific precautions:

1. We state what we are not — in the footer of every page and in full on the About page — and we link to pizzamoto.com where it is relevant.
2. We use none of their material. No logo, no photographs, no menu copy, no marketing text, no brand graphics. The visual identity here is our own and is not modeled on theirs.
3. We do not republish their contact details, including the 2010 phone number and email address preserved in the Internet Archive. Reproducing those would route people to a company we have no relationship with, which is the exact harm the disclosure exists to prevent.

If Pizza Moto, or anyone else described on this site, considers something here inaccurate or misrepresenting, we will review it against the sources and correct or remove it. That applies to the whole site including the pages restored at legacy addresses.

Photography

Every photograph on this site is either public domain or published under a Creative Commons license that permits reuse, and every one is credited to its photographer with the license named and a link to the source record.

We do not hotlink images from other sites, scrape social media, or republish press photography whose licensing does not clearly permit it. Where a historically important image exists but cannot be legally reused, we describe it and point to where it lives rather than taking it.

Images are stored locally, converted to WebP, served at several sizes with explicit dimensions, and the credit line on each one is generated automatically from a license manifest rather than typed by hand — so a credit cannot drift away from the file it belongs to. The full list is in the sources and method page.

Corrections

Errors get fixed, and the fix is visible. A correction to a material fact is noted on the page itself with the date and what changed. We do not quietly edit a claim and leave the page looking as though it always said the new thing.

Where sources genuinely disagree, we say so in the text instead of picking the more convenient one. There is an example on the Pizza Moto history page: a first-hand account describes the restaurant's run as "a decade" while the documented service dates give seven years and four months. We print both and explain the likely reconciliation rather than choosing.

Artificial intelligence

Research and drafting tools were used in building this site. That does not change the standard applied to it: every factual claim traces to a named source that a reader can check, dates and quotations were verified against primary records — chiefly the Internet Archive — and nothing was published because it sounded plausible.

The failure mode of generated text is confident invention. The countermeasure is the source discipline described on the next page, and the fact that every article ends with a list of exactly what it was built from.