Joe’s Pizza (Spider-Man 2)

Every superhero needs a day job. In Spider-Man 2 (2004), Peter Parker’s pays in tips and trouble: he’s a delivery boy for a tiny Greenwich Village slice shop, forever late and forever apologizing — because stopping a bank robbery does terrible things to your delivery times. That slice shop is real. It’s Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Street, and it was feeding New Yorkers for nearly thirty years before Peter Parker ever parked a scooter outside it.

The Scene

Raimi’s sequel finds Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) broke and exhausted, juggling his secret life with a minimum-wage delivery gig. His boss is Mr. Aziz (Aasif Mandvi), a man with exactly one religion: Joe’s famous 29-minute guarantee. “Joe’s 29-minute guarantee is a promise, man.”

The signature sequence: Peter gets an order that must travel 42 blocks in seven and a half minutes. Impossible on a scooter — so he ditches it in an alley, pulls on the suit, and webslings across the city with a stack of pizzas. He doesn’t make it. The pizzas arrive late and ruined, and Mr. Aziz fires him on the spot.

The scenes were shot on location in spring 2003 — set photos from April 21, 2003 show Maguire in full Spider-Man costume wearing the Joe’s delivery gear outside the shop. One heads-up: the storefront in the film was Joe’s original corner spot at Bleecker and Carmine; after the lease expired, the shop moved three doors down to its current home at 7 Carmine Street. Same pies, same family, a few steps away.

The Backstory

Joe’s was founded in 1975 by Pino “Joe” Pozzuoli, an immigrant from Naples, Italy — the birthplace of pizza itself — who opened a humble corner slice shop at Bleecker and Carmine. It never tried to be anything more than a perfect New York slice, and that’s exactly why it became a “Greenwich Village institution.”

The place briefly closed in 2005 but came roaring back, and the recipe never changed: thin, crisp, foldable slices with tangy sauce and well-melted cheese. New York Times critic Pete Wells wrote in 2018 that when new slice shops “emulate the old-school joints that still obsess over quality, Joe’s is one of the places they’re talking about.” Today there are more Joe’s locations across Manhattan and Brooklyn — but Carmine Street is the original, and the one that matters.

What to Look For

The shop at 7 Carmine is a classic Village slice joint: a small storefront under the red Joe’s sign and a line that spills onto the sidewalk late at night. Order the plain cheese slice — the benchmark — and eat it the New York way: folded, standing up, possibly while walking. Joe’s stays open late (the official site lists hours running to 3 or 4 a.m. depending on the night). And freeze-frame the movie before you go: sharp-eyed fans have spotted that Peter’s delivery helmet sticker misspells “Bleecker” as “Bleeker.”

Getting There

Joe’s Pizza, 7 Carmine Street, New York, NY 10014 — in Greenwich Village, steps from the corner of Bleecker and Carmine, just off Sixth Avenue. The A, C, E, B, D, F, or M to West 4th St–Washington Square puts you a couple of blocks away; the 1 to Christopher St–Sheridan Square works too.

Trivia

• The storefront had screen time before Spidey: it appeared in a 2002 Nike commercial, “Jason Giambi Goes Yard,” measuring distances from Yankee Stadium.
• Gamers know it too — the Joe’s Pizza parlors in Grand Theft Auto III (2001) were modeled directly on the real storefront, reportedly from an actual photograph of the shop.
• In 2011, Conan O’Brien visited Joe’s on his TBS show Conan to learn how to make an authentic New York slice.
• The shop keeps popping up in Marvel’s New York: Trish Walker orders from Joe’s in Jessica Jones, and Claire Temple buys Davos a slice in Iron Fist.

The Hunt Clue

“On Carmine Street where the ovens blaze,

a broke young hero once raced through the haze —

the twenty-nine-minute promise is the test:

find the shop where Spidey delivered his best!”

Photo by Jim.henderson via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0