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The Manhattan Pizza Wars of a decade or so ago are mostly over — they’re the stuff of bardic legend now. Anthony Malgieri of Una Pizza Napoletana won. There’s still plenty of good pizza to be had without fuss, but among the flour-blend-parsing micro-gastronomists and list-checking pizza partisans, his pull remains so strong that his place has gone not only reservation only but single-pizza only: one per reservee. It used to be that a new brick oven roared to life every few months, but the heat has seemed to cool as pizza has yielded city dominance to other cuisines. There are few better proofs than the fact that Malgieri’s toughest competition (some say slightly better, some say nearly as good), Razza, isn’t in New York at all but Jersey.

So when one of the hypiest pizzerias in Tokyo — now a world capital of pizza-making and one well suited to the obsessive trial-and-error of sauce-and-dough alchemy — opened in the East Village, it was rippling news. Reservations disappeared quickly, and still do, even if the restaurant itself seems less like a Tokyo temple of pizza than yet another new-build St. Mark’s fast-casual joint with “Land Down Under” and “Come On, Eileen” blasting on the soundtrack. (The space used to be Moody Tongue Pizza, a pizzeria by Chicago’s Moody Tongue brewery, which runs the space and supplies the numerous beers.) I was able, without too much trouble, to find single seats at the bar with a few days’ notice, but two separate pairs of would-be diners were turned away from the restaurant as I entered. “I have a wait list of about 40 people,” a host explained. She’d been telling people, “I can add you, but it might happen, it might not.” (“That’s crazy,” one of the rejects muttered.)

Pizza Studio Tamaki is the first U.S. branch of the Japanese original, which started in Tokyo in 2017 and now has four locations throughout Japan. Within a few years of opening, it became a mainstay of international best-pizza lists (PST’s founder, Tsubasa Tamaki, currently sits at No. 18 worldwide on this list), renowned for a kind of mad-science punctiliousness. The flour blend in Tamaki’s dough is a mix of Canadian, American, and Japanese wheats, milled at his precise direction; according to the New York Times, sacks of the stuff required the approval of the FDA. Details like this have made PST a bragging right and an Instagram fixture. Tamaki told the Times he already has agreements in place for franchises in the U.K., France, Australia, and Indonesia, as well as requests from several other territories.

With a ramp-up like that, is there any way Tamaki’s actual pizza could live up to its reputation? Out it sailed, shaped like a flattening tire and carbuncled with char, the cheese glossy and the sauce vividly red with a few half-frizzled basil leaves just so: a pizza prima donna, ready for its close-up. I was far from the only person at the bar with an iPhone aimed squarely at my prize, and the spotlight fixtures above the bar seem calculated for just that. I enjoyed both a control-group margherita and a new butter-chicken special, a popular off-menu item whose mix of chicken, tomato, cumin, carraway, and flatbread did suggest all of the components of Indian takeout, though in a sort of loose, allusive way. They’re worthy entrants to the city’s pizza scene, if not levelers. Among the few apps, there was nothing wrong with a tower of Wagyu meatballs or a pile of suave, oil-drenched broccoli, but why bother? You’re here for pizza.

If the experience didn’t turn out to be a religious one, it did shock me in one way. One of Tamaki’s innovations is to dial down the salt in the dough itself and make up the difference by scattering handfuls of it in the oven for the pizza to bake on. It gives the pizza what’s called shio no shigeki in Japanese: “the salt punch.” Punch it is. You get the salt stratum first, essentially distinct from the pie. I had the disorienting experience of total flavor dissociation: I tasted salt before I even tasted pizza, the two profiles floating on what seem to be parallel planes. I found this fascinating on the first bite and distracting after that. There seemed to be no way to avoid it — I couldn’t re-knead the dough to distribute it — until I stumbled on the solution. The salt punch depends on the salt hitting your tongue first, before you’ve even had a chance to chew — but what if it didn’t? I am sure it constitutes pizza crime, and I take my life in my hands to recommend it to you, so use at your own discretion: Enjoy your pizza (a knife and fork are invaluable here) upside down. Oh, and if you’re here for the picture, take it first.