dough.cheese.sauce

Downtown Reno  ·  New York–Style Pizza  ·  $  · www.doughcheesesauce.com

There's a version of this city where the New York slice never really arrived. Marvin Kinney — who already gave us R Town Pizza, one of the essential tables in this guide — has fixed that with dough.cheese.sauce, a proper New York slice shop in downtown Reno at 600 South Center Street. Eight to ten pies in the window, rotating, waiting. You point. They cut. You eat.

The menu runs to the familiar and the Marvin-esque in equal measure. There's a Plain (red sauce, pecorino, oregano), a tomato pie that is nothing more than sauce and garlic and pecorino and is absolutely correct for it, and a White Pie with shaved lemon and whipped ricotta. Then there are the pies that wander a little — the Brighton with vodka sauce and whipped ricotta; the Gabagool with capicola, castelvetrano olives, and a drizzle of vegan hot honey; the Midtown piled with pepperoni, sausage, mushroom, onion, bells, and olives.

I went with the Classic: red sauce, two kinds of pepperoni including the cup-and-char that blooms and blisters in the oven, oregano. It was excellent. The crust folds cleanly, the cheese pulls right, the pepperoni edges curl into little grease pools the way they're supposed to. I folded it in half and ate it standing at the counter. That's the only right way to do this.

The table holds mason jar shakers of red pepper flake and fresh-grated parm. There's a sticker on the counter with the logo — a pizza-oven arch, the Nevada outline, the name. It's all a little bit downtown New York and entirely Reno. Whole pies available too, if you can't bring yourself to choose just one slice.

Don't miss: The Classic, folded. And if the tomato pie is in the window, get a slice of that too — it's a lesson in restraint that pays off in every bite.