Bleecker Street Pizza, in the Heart of the Village

Anyone making a tour of New York City's must-eat pizza parlors would sooner or later stop at Bleecker Street Pizza.

Not only does it get accolades from the New York Times and the Food Network, but its location at Bleecker Street and 7th Avenue puts it in the heart of the West Village. If you've spent a week in New York and haven't passed within a few blocks of it, I'd be shocked.

Paul got a gift certificate to Bleecker Street Pizza last year, but we hadn't been both in the neighborhood and without dinner plans on any weekend since. But when we planned to see "Norwegian Wood" at the IFC earlier this month, we were going to be just a few blocks away. So our dinner and a movie was really pizza and a movie.

And the pizza is good. I detest folding my pizza in half like so many New Yorkers do, and Bleecker Street's sturdy thin crust gave me no reason to. But the mozzarella sticks stole the show. They were firm and crispy and almost delicious enough I could have forgotten the pizza for another order of sticks.

The location couldn't be any better, but inside it's much closer to your typical hole-in-the-wall restaurant: cramped tables, bad lighting and no space. But none of those things affect the food. While you eat off of paper plates and aluminum containers, you can gaze at the line of photos of celebrities who have given Bleecker Street Pizza a try: Anderson Cooper, Edward Norton and many, many more I barely recognized.

Overall, Bleecker Street Pizza was a quick and cheap stop, with slices much superior to the typical pizza-by-the-slice joints around town. Try the mozzarella sticks.