Fame has come late for Domenico DeMarco, who for 40 years has operated Di Fara Pizza on Avenue J in Midwood, Brooklyn. Since 1999, the year that a favorable review in a city guidebook put his pies on the map, Mr. DeMarco has graced the cover of The Village Voice (the ”Best Italian Restaurants” issue in June), and his restaurant has topped the Zagat list of the city’s best pizzerias in 2004 and countless other guides to slice-related nirvana.

Through it all, Mr. DeMarco has changed very little. With his hair slicked back and flour on his shoes, he has continued to make each pizza personally as 3 of his 7 children labor in the back. He maintains beds of basil and rosemary on the windowsill, and imports nearly every ingredient from such faraway lands as Israel and the Netherlands. The man insists on no less than 3 different cheeses on each pizza, and chowhounds line up, sometimes for more than 1 hour to buy a regular slice for $2.50 or the Sicilian for $2.75. The city’s reigning pizza deity is pleased by this sort of success, but he is hardly surprised.

2010-10-25: man, i still haven’t been 😦

2018-06-12:

Longtime customers have noted fresh cows’-milk mozzarella in and out of rotation with the firmer, low-moisture variety. Grana Padano, once a fixture of Di Fara, stopped making appearances after the countertop-mounted rotary grater broke. Parmigiano and Pecorino replaced it for a while. There was even a short-lived era where the crusts were enigmatically burnt, seemingly by design, and that’s where things turn philosophical. “Dom’s pizza is a flowing river in that the only thing you can really count on is perpetual change, and that’s part of what’s interesting about it. He hasn’t stuck to the same method for 50 years.”

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