Still a Neighborhood Slice Shop: How East Village Pizza Maintains a 4.5 Rating and 1.6 Million Instagram Followers

PMQ Pizza Magazine, the pizza industry's trade publication, returned to East Village Pizza for another look at what keeps a single, no-frills slice shop breaking through nationally: a 4.5-star rating built on more than 2,400 real customer reviews, and an Instagram following in the seven figures that keeps growing years after most restaurant accounts plateau.

The throughline of PMQ's coverage is that none of it happened by accident. Owner Frank Kabatas started posting the shop's pizzas being stretched, sauced, and baked back in 2012, long before restaurant social media was standard practice, and he still treats the account as a daily part of running the business rather than a marketing afterthought.

What keeps readers there, according to the piece, is that the growth hasn't changed what East Village Pizza actually is. The 72-hour cold-fermented dough, the fresh mozzarella, and signature items like the double-stacked pizza are the same fundamentals the shop has run on for two decades — the difference is that a following of over a million people now gets to watch it happen.

For PMQ's trade audience, the piece functions as a case study in longevity: a corner pizzeria at 145 1st Ave in the East Village that has scaled its reach without scaling away from being, in Kabatas's own framing, still a neighborhood slice shop.