Once fired from the pizzeria he now owns, Frank Kabatas recounts the journey of East Village Pizza

AM New York Metro's profile of Frank Kabatas and East Village Pizza draws its power from a single quote that Kabatas gave the publication and that captures his story better than any summary could: "I never had pizza in my life before East Village Pizza — I had a lot of firsts here." That sentence is the origin and the destination at once: a man who came to New York in 1997 without ever having eaten pizza, and who built one of the city's best-known pizza restaurants out of that complete inexperience.

The AMNY profile took a particular interest in the sequence of what Kabatas calls his firsts. His first pizza was at East Village Pizza, eaten on the job as a new delivery driver. His first firing was from the same restaurant, six months after he started. His first experience of ownership was also at East Village Pizza, when he purchased it in 2003. Each of those firsts redefined what came next, and the pattern — arrival, failure, return, mastery — is the structure of the story that has been told in the New York Post, the New York Times, NBC New York, Good Morning America, and now AMNY.

The quote about comfort zones is worth examining. "Everything that I've done so far, it has changed my comfort zone." This is not the language of someone who had a plan and executed it. It is the language of someone who kept encountering situations that required more than he had at the time, and kept expanding to meet them. The delivery job required language skills he was still developing. The decision to buy the restaurant required financial and business knowledge he had to acquire. The evolution of the menu — the 72-hour fermented dough, the fresh mozzarella, the double-stacked pizza, the heart-shaped pizza — required technical refinement that came from years of attention and experimentation.

AMNY captured the restaurant during a period of genuine momentum. The New York Times profile had run recently. The Instagram following had crossed 1.7 million. The double-stacked pizza had appeared on PIX11. The restaurant that Kabatas had purchased in 2003 as a neighborhood slice shop had become something the city paid attention to. The profile placed all of that in the context of the delivery driver who was fired after six months, which is the context that makes the momentum meaningful rather than expected.

The pizza that resulted from this journey is available daily at 145 1st Ave in Manhattan's East Village. The cheese slice at $4.99, the double-stacked pie at $46, the heart-shaped Margherita at $31.99 — every item on the menu reflects the years of work that Kabatas describes in the AMNY profile as the ongoing expansion of his comfort zone. Open until 3AM on weekdays and 5AM on weekends, serving the East Village, Lower East Side, Union Square, and surrounding neighborhoods. Order online or call (212) 529-4545. For a man who had never eaten pizza before 1997, he has gotten very good at making it.