Like the debate over which Ray's is the original, the fight over who has New York City's best slice will likely never end. But a good chunk of people—from celebrities to tourists to dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers—would bestow that honor on Famous Joe's. Those people are 100% correct. Joe's—they're famous enough that no one bothers with the word in their name—serves no-frills slices to a never-ending queue of pizza lovers in Greenwich Village.
The walls are covered in pictures of celebrities posing with the guys behind the counter, who are such fixtures of the place that they have a certain cachet of their own. The 75 year-old owner, Neapolitan immigrant Joe Pozzuoli, still owns and operates the joint after four decades, which goes a ways toward explaining the consistent quality of the pizza. Yes, you have seen Joe's in Spider-man 2, when The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi was berating Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker for not delivering pizzas fast enough. Those were the heady days before Joe's was displaced from the corner of Carmine and Bleecker by a fancy-pants gelato store—they now live half a block away. But where they are is immaterial, in the long run, because the best pizza is the best pizza no matter where you get it. Just as long as you get it at Joe's.