This Is NYC's Most Iconic Food

NEW YORK — The New York pizza slice — a dish that has filled Big Apple bellies for more than a century — is sublime in its consistency and ubiquity. The cheese bubbles. The crust crunches. The grease pools and drips. The sauce binds it all together.

For those and many more reasons, it is New York City's most iconic food.

Pizza beat out seven other beloved culinary symbols of the city in the NYC Snackdown, Patch's quest to determine which legendary dish best represents the city to the world.

It wasn't even close in the end. Pie lovers and slice fanatics gave pizza 877 votes last week, while hot dogs — a vaunted gastronomic creation in their own right — only got 270.

Pizza's roots in the city run deep. America's first pizzeria can be found in Little Italy at Lombardi's, which started serving pies in 1905. Slice shops eventually proliferated across the city in the mid-20th century, an era that spawned NY Pizza Suprema near Penn Station and Joe's Pizza in Greenwich Village, according to Serious Eats.

Now a pizza joint can be found on virtually every block, from the dollar slices at 2 Bros. to the handcrafted pies at Di Fara in Brooklyn to the modern spin at Mama's Too on the Upper West Side.

No matter one's loyalties, pizza is one of New York's comforts of home, one that is often imitated but never imitated and never duplicated. Those who partake and it can sit with a slice and their thoughts, or run with it to their next meeting — unless they're at John's of Bleecker Street, where you've got to get the whole pie.

What's your favorite New York pizza story? Where do you go for a slice? Tell us in the comments. And check out the full results of Patch's NYC Snackdown below.