Shape-shifting slices borrowed from other forms of Italian food (baked ziti slice, for example) are particularly filling, and often can make a full meal. Here at this Kingsbridge mainstay the lasagna slice is exemplary, with clumps of herby ground beef, squirts of ricotta, and a tomato sauce sweet enough to almost be your dessert.

This South Bronx mainstay without much seating on Mott Haven’s main drag turns out some magnificent pies of a plain variety. Really, the plain cheese slice accounts for most of its traffic, with pepperoni an optional addition. The crust is of medium weight, with middling cheese and a zesty sauce. I dream about slices like this that have no need to wow you with eye-catching toppings.

Founded in 1959, Upper West Sider Sal & Carmine is the plainest of the plain, and thus one of the city’s foremost paragons of the neighborhood slice genre. The crust is utilitarian, devoid of flashiness but totally getting the job done, while the sauce is subtly flavorful without announcing itself, and the ample good cheese mixes with the sauce so it becomes an amalgam. 

The great white slice is the Moby Dick of the pizza world. Eschewing the tomato sauce, which provides acid and color to a pie, it goes all cheesy on us, ladling on the cheese so that it flows over the sides of the slice, then throwing gobs of ricotta — even whiter — like an abstract painter. This is where pizza meets khachapuri, and there’s no better white slice in town than Steinway’s, with its crust of modest thickness and opulent quantities of cheese.

Since 1964, the magnificent Pizza Suprema has been satisfying Penn Station commuters, who dash into the pizzeria for a quick slice and rarely linger. Office workers tend to stay at lunch, when all the booths and eating shelves are occupied. A wealth of slices are offered, but my favorite is the Sicilian sausage, with a gleaming, burnished crust and oblong slices of forcemeat thrown on helter-skelter, as if the pizzaiolo preferred that you get substantial bites of sausage once in a while rather than a little with every bite.

Founded in 1975 when the corner of Carmine and Bleecker streets was one of the the city’s quintessential Italian neighborhoods, Joe’s has always been a paragon of plainness. The slices are mainly restricted to cheese, pepperoni, Sicilian, and a grandma slice, here termed “fresh mozzarella.” The latter is the best; like the plain cheese it boasts a sauce that’s seemingly herbless, a crust that is the slice’s most important element, and fresh mozzarella that squeaks slightly when you bit into it.

Situated just above the E and F lines in downtown Forest Hills, Gloria is another one of those pizzerias that believes itself to be an elegant restaurant, providing a streamlined modernity in its 1960s-era premises. The number of slice selections is greater than most, but my favorite is the grandma slice, which tastes like something you might have acquired at a street fair with its topping of tomato sauce and a fresh slice of tomato.

Call it neo-neighborhood if you like — this Lower East Side pizzeria looks much older than it is, and uses superior quality ingredients, including flour milled in the basement, to embroider on and improve the neighborhood pizzeria formula. The Sicilian grandma slice is a case in point, with a crunchy bottom on a flavorful crust, fresh mozzarella in addition to regular pizza cheese, and basil leaves draped across the top at the last minute.

This Williamsburg mainstay, open since 1967, is one of Brooklyn’s more elegant pizzerias, and you’d never hesitate to take a date here. The place is decorated with lots of marble, and the slices are fastidiously turned out, with a “bone” (the circumferential hump of dough) thinner than most and dough more bouncy than crisp. My favorite here is an eggplant slice with little hillocks of ricotta.

Let’s say you can’t decide between pizza and pasta. Probably invented in the Bronx at least a decade earlier, the ziti slice at Danny’s — a semi-luxurious pizzeria in East Williamsburg — will answer the question for you, because you can have both. In many versions of this crazy slice the pasta is too soft, but Danny’s ziti is more al dente, making for a better chew, and the smothering of cheese makes this wonderful slice a satisfying full meal.

Yes, there are dozens of pizzerias with the name Sal plastered on the front, but this one is Bushwick’s greatest slice shop, and the sausage roll ain’t shabby, either. The corner storefront is spacious with views of the neighborhood, and the Sicilian is the best option — a perfect square, darker than most, crisp of crust with thick rivulets of perky sauce, and altogether excellent.

Despite the name, coffee is not the whole point of this place near the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in Bay Ridge. Sure, the slice is cheesy, with the meltingly soft mozzarella in great pools, but the sauce is great, too, tasting powerfully of fresh tomatoes, even though the tomatoes are almost certainly canned. A real small-scale pizza miracle.

Kings Highway is Brooklyn’s Camino Real, and a major business zone radiates from the elevated Q and B tracks and the express station there. One spot secreted away underneath is Kings Pizza, which has almost too many pizza choices visible in its glass cases, swarmed by students when school lets out. Love bacon? Well the bacon slice has more of it in crumbled form, along with the ensuing smoky flavors, than any other slice featuring bacon I’ve ever come across. It’s like eating a pound of bacon at one sitting. (The slice is not always available.)