Above all, there's the line.

It's omnipresent. It barely moves. Those who line up shuffle forward, silent and resigned to delay. It's like one of those old starving-Soviet-proletariat bread lines. I sent a friend there to check out the line and he said somebody in it was reading Crime and Punishment. That's a slow line.

The place with the line is called Artichoke Basille’s. It sells pizza, mostly slices, on 14th Street.

I got in line. After a while, a long while, I approached the front of the shop. A 106-ounce can of Italian peeled tomatoes propped open the front window. Junk piled up behind the window included an Elvis photo, a crappy beer mug, and a photo of a Jake LaMotta-Sugar Ray Robinson fight.

The woman in front of me said, “I live two blocks away. There’s always a line when it’s open, but it’s always closed. Even if you go when they say it will be open, it’s closed.”

We took a tiny step forward.

The woman with her added, “This is bad line management, the kind you see in San Francisco. I want to take over, get this place moving.”

“You need a lot of patience to eat here,” the first lady said.

Somebody carrying a pizza box wanted to get out of the shop, so we all took a step backward. The door isn’t wide enough for people to go in and come out at the same time if one is carrying a pizza. So the people going in have to give ground.

When the two women got to the counter, they started discussing the number of slices they wanted. They’d been in line for 25 minutes but hadn’t bothered to work this out. I don’t think San Francisco is to blame for any of the problems in their lives.

There’s another, more serious hitch in the Artichoke Basille’s line: The afternoon I went, one guy was doing everything. Making pizza. Cooking pizza. Selling slices. Bagging slices. Taking money. Any fewer employees and the joint would have been closed.

I started to order. “I’ll have…” Mid-sentence, he lost interest in me, turned away, and started making a pizza. Added five minutes to my wait.

This gave me another chance to look around. The interior features a shiny, galvanized garbage can sitting under a functioning chandelier. Now there’s a design element rarely seen in shelter magazines. The pizza ovens look like hell.

There’s no menu. I’d heard from the ladies in line that the specialty was a spinach-and-artichoke pizza that reminded them of artichoke dip. The guy said one would be ready in two hours. He did have standard slices. I was offered a cheese/tomato sauce/basil leaf combo. I liked the thin Neapolitan slice better than the thick Sicilian. Massive slices, $2.50 per slice.

This is ordinary pizza. It’s also fabulous pizza.

At Artichoke Basille’s, you don’t just get pizza. You get blessed relief from all the sanctimonious pizza now being peddled in New York. No flour from an ancient fattoria in Tuscany. No basil smuggled in from a dissident farmer’s market in Croatia. No fanatical obsessiveness.

I liked the thin slice better than the thick. The thin isn’t so thin that you need anything thicker. I thought the sauce, if it really did come from canned tomatoes, tasted remarkably fresh. Despite the heft, the load of cheese and sauce, the ingredients were beautifully balanced.

This isn’t just pizza. This is the way ordinary food used to taste in New York—superficially no different from food anywhere else, but in reality considerably better. It had little to do with superior ingredients and everything to do with New York know-how.

I only wish the damn line moved faster. There’s a help wanted sign in the window. Please, would somebody take the job.

328 East 14th Street (near First Avenue), New York, NY; 212-228-2004

"You're through," I said, the moment he sat down. "You're no longer New York's Ramen King."

"What are you talking about?" replied David Chang. "I never called myself the Ramen King. I never said I was doing authentic food."

I had invited Chang to lunch at Ippudo NY, a new ramen shop operated by Shigemi Kawahara, who does indeed call himself the Ramen King. He has a chain of ramen restaurants in Japan and recently opened his first branch in New York, where he serves his “original recipe tonkotsu soup.” It comes with pork, noodles, cabbage, scallions, bits of gangly purple mushrooms, and, if desired, a dollop of “special secret sauce.”

“If you were the Ramen King, you’d know what’s in the special secret sauce,” I said.

“I’m not the Ramen King, and I have no idea what’s in anybody’s special secret sauce,” Chang said.

I asked him to take note of the chairs. Not hard wooden stools like those at Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar. Ippudo has big, soft, white bar chairs. Some of them have arms. His and mine had arms on either side, but none in the middle. To me it felt as though we were two guys sitting side-by-side on a Japanese love seat. 

“Got you beat in the stool department, too,” I said.

Chang has a wonderful attitude. He managed not to look sorry he had shown up.

Chang’s westernized version of ramen (essentially noodles in broth) started his astonishingly successful mini-empire, now up to three restaurants. He knows a lot about ramen. Even though he is Korean-American, he has pretty much the same passion for ramen as do the Japanese. He says of this obsession, “If you take all the crazes that Americans have for hamburgers, pizzas, and barbecue and add them up, it still wouldn’t add up to the fervor that the Japanese have for ramen.”

Japan seems to have infinite styles of ramen, and Ippudo specializes in tonkotsu soup, which is made from pork and pork bones. As Chang put it, admiringly, “The broth in this style can be repulsive if it’s not done right, and Ippudo does it right. It’s basically pure pork and pork fat in an emulsion (a mixture of two liquids that will not blend). It’s very difficult, one of the hardest to make, and the resulting broth has a lot of nuances.”

I had come to Ippudo to review the food, and for that Chang was of little help, since the only food he will criticize is his own. This is him on his own ramen: “We serve crappy Pan-Asian ramen made for round-eyes.” This is him on the food at Ippudo: “I like it all.”

I wasn’t quite that impressed.

The broth is indeed wonderful. My recommendation is to order one of the two basic variations on tonkotsu soup, either the “Shiromaru NY” or the “Akamaru Modern.” They aren’t much different. Take the Shiromaru NY, add some secret sauce, and you've got the Akamaru Modern.

We tried to figure out what was in the secret sauce, which is a dab of red paste than looks fiery but is actually only faintly spicy. It seems to contain oil, garlic, and bits of meaty stuff. Maybe soy, too.

The best way to dine at Ippudo is to order the Akamaru Modern with the secret sauce on the side. Without the sauce, the broth tastes fatty with a distinct pork flavor. When you mix in the sauce, the broth becomes reddish, spicy, and better balanced, but it lacks the distinct pork flavor. Your choice.

The noodles are house-made and excellent. They come to the counter al dente, and somehow avoid turning soggy. Chang said that was because Japanese noodles contain kansui, an alkaline additive that increases elasticity and firmness. He happily went on and on about iso-electric shifts in the wheat.

The rest of the ramen soup-package isn’t special: A few slices of supposedly stewed pork that tasted roasted. Some of the aforementioned veggie bits. I suggest ordering a side dish of pork belly for $3; it’s first-rate eaten alone and even better when dumped into the broth.

Ippudo is a chain, but it will only remind you of one if you order the other menu items. The pickled vegetables looked like 1980s French spa cuisine and are more sugary than vinegary. The deep-fried chicken was overcooked and came with a too-sweet sauce. The plate of assorted fried fish, meat and vegetables, all overly breaded, will not remind you of tempura—particularly not the ham chunk. The Ippudo Roll—a pork, egg and cucumber sushi-style roll—was inedible: gummy rice, dried-out filling. Service, on the other hand, was first-rate and sweet.

I asked Chang if he would be able to produce the tonkotsu style of ramen if given the challenge. He said he was pretty sure he could, but if he made such an attempt at authenticity, a lot of Asians were sure to say, “He’s an asshole, a wannabe.”

He added, “If I were an Asian, that’s what I’d say about me.”

65 Fourth Avenue (near East Tenth Street), New York, NY; 212-388-0088; www.ippudo.com/ny