L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele

There are only two things on the menu: margherita and marinara. That's it. No toppings. No variations. No salads, no desserts, no appetizers. The Condurro family has been running this pizzeria since 1870 and in five generations they have never seen a reason to add a third option. When Elizabeth Gilbert ate here in "Eat Pray Love" and the resulting movie scene sent tourist numbers into the stratosphere, they still didn't change the menu. You get tomato with mozzarella, or tomato without mozzarella, and you sit down and be grateful.

The logic is purist to the point of philosophy. Michele Condurro, the family patriarch whose name stuck, believed pizza was a perfect food that needed exactly two expressions. The dough is made from the same recipe — flour, water, salt, yeast, and a long slow rise — and cooked in a wood-fired oven at roughly 450 degrees Celsius for about 60 seconds. The result is a pizza with a charred, pillowy cornice, a thin soupy center, and the kind of tomato sauce that tastes like tomatoes are supposed to taste but almost never do.

The queue is legendary. During peak season, you can wait an hour or more on the narrow street outside, ticket number in hand, watching locals with connections skip the line through back doors. The interior is bare — fluorescent lights, paper-covered tables, zero ambiance — because ambiance would imply that anything other than the pizza matters. It doesn't.

Da Michele has spawned imitators worldwide, from London to Tokyo, but the original on Via Cesare Sersale remains a pilgrimage site. Whether it's actually the best pizza in Naples is a fight this description will not be starting. But if you have to choose one place, the five-generation argument is persuasive.