My friend Daveena once recounted to me a marvelous tale of an old man in a faraway land with mystical powers. He made pizzas the like of which could not be found anywhere, near or far, she said. When he passes on, she added darkly, those magical pizzas would be lost forever.

OK, so the faraway land is actually the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Since I live in California, it’s still quite a trek, but visiting friends and staying in Manhattan made it much closer. It might be a long ride on the J train, but once you get out at the Avenue Q stop, you’re less than a block away from pizza paradise. But wait. Does paradise have lines and $2 cans of soda?

Fortunately, DiFara’s wasn’t too busy when my friend Julia and I hit it on Saturday at lunchtime, maybe because of the August lull in New York. It’s a very modest place, except for the awards and articles papering the walls, and tiny — after hovering for a few minutes like hawks, we were able to pounce on seats at half a table, but barely. Two men — one the legendary Domenico De Marco, 70-something, who looks like he could go one making pizzas for another few decades, and a younger assistant — toil unhurriedly behind the narrow tiled counter.

We were able to get our regular slices right away, but the Sicilian would have to wait, the younger guy told me.

Snippets of basil perfumed the plain pizza, and the cheese had a tangy bite — from Romano, said one of the articles on the wall, but a well-informed blogger, and Epicurious, identify it as Grana Padano augmenting the mozzarella. And then there’s lashings of olive oil drenching the slice — not exactly a bad thing, as it’s extra-virgin, but it was practically dissolving the ultra-thin crust below.

In fact, many fans consider Sicilian pizza to be DiFara’s true draw. Our table neighbors got the drool-worthy whole pie shown at top.

This knocked my socks off. I went through a phase in my youth, when we moved from Chicago to suburban New York, of fascination with Sicilian pizza because of the similarity to my name. But the Sicilian pizzas I’ve had, puffy squares of bready crust topped with indifferent cheese and sauce, instantly paled in my memory as I beheld this perfectly imperfect slice and took my first bite, my teeth cutting through strata of cheese and tomato and crust that shifted from satisfyingly chewy to crunchy. This may be the Sicilian pizza to end all Sicilian pizzas. And is it the best pizza in New York?

Wait! There is another…

Di Fara Pizza
1424 Ave. J (at E. 15th St.)
Brooklyn, NY 11230
718-258-1367