The layers keep rising, spooned into the round pan not in full moons but in alternating rays like the sun’s, gossamer dough then melted cheese, with bouts in the oven in between. It takes hours. The top looks like parchment snatched from a fire, patched bronze at the edges and scorched at the heart.

In Albania, the savory cake, called fli or flija, is traditionally baked outdoors, not over heat but under it, the pan sealed by a domed lid that’s warmed over open flames and heaped with embers. At Tradita, which opened in February in the Norwood section of the Bronx, it is made in a great wood-fired pizza oven that looms in a corner, a concession to modernity.

For years, this cramped storefront at the northern end of the D train was a straightforward Neapolitan pizzeria. Little trace of that past remains: The oven is shiny and new, imported from Italy, and the artfully distressed walls are covered with black-and-white photographs from 19th-century Albania, the most striking one showing a mustachioed man in a white felt hat and quilted cummerbund, rifle rigid on his shoulder.

Ramiz Kukaj, an ethnic Albanian from Peja, Kosovo, first thought of Tradita nine years ago. His American-born son, then 12, asked if he could take his friends to an Albanian restaurant, to show them his family’s heritage. Although the Bronx is home to one of the city’s largest populations of Albanian immigrants (and was a haven for Kosovar refugees after ethnic cleansing in Serbia), Mr. Kukaj said, “I couldn’t give him a place.”