If You’re Not Ordering Dessert at L’Industrie, You’re Missing Out
Finding unexpected gems in the pastry case at New York City’s favorite slice shop.
I’ve never not waited in line for a slice of pizza at L’Industrie, a New York-style pizza shop that has, in recent years, become an icon of the genre. It could be pouring rain or freezing cold and still there would be a line of people out the door at either the Williamsburg or West Village locations. Such is the lure of the foldable, thin crust slices made by Massimo Laveglia.
When Laveglia and his business partner Nick Baglivo opened L’Industrie in 2017, they stepped into a line of their own, joining a succession of pizzamen (and women) in New York dating back to the first brick oven pizzas coming out of Italian American enclaves in the late 1800s.
Last year, on assignment for an Eater story about the state of New York’s first-generation slice shops, I learned that L’Industrie ranks among modern places like Best Pizza and Paulie Gee’s that riffed on the classic New York slice with cheffy ingredients like Calabrian chili or dollops of creamy burrata. These shops aimed to remedy the dollar-slice syndrome of affordable but lackluster pizza plaguing the city. They paid closer attention to process details like fermenting the dough overnight for flavor rather than relying on shortcuts like sugar.
You could call this group the third wave of slice shops; same basic principle, premium quality pizza. But L’Industrie also offers something no other slice shop does, third wave or not: Dessert (and it’s more than just ice cream).
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