"What's the best way to set New Yorkers to bickering? Ask where to find the best slice of pizza in the city. No subject starts a battle faster—not bagels or hot dogs or chopped liver, not even the primacy of the Rangers or the fastest route to J.F.K. Pizza, introduced to New York in 1905 by Gennaro Lombardi, who saw it as a way to use up the day-old bread in his Spring Street grocery store, has long been the affordable, satisfying food of choice for peripatetic New Yorkers of every age, sex, race, and class."

I wrote that in November of 2002 in the New York Times. The title of the story said it all: "The State of the Slice."

Recently, I started wondering about the state of the slice today. So much has changed in the last 17 years. While we've certainly witnessed a revival of the New York slice, you could also argue that it's been reinvented, all because of five perhaps inseparable factors:

The explosion of food culture over the last two decades, thanks in a major way to...

over the last two decades, thanks in a major way to... The rise of food-obsessed websites —yes, like the very one you're reading now. Which helped inform and connect...

—yes, like the very one you're reading now. Which helped inform and connect... Exacting personalities intent on reinventing and elevating humble foods , like burgers, fried chicken, barbecue, ramen, and more. Which eventually included...

, like burgers, fried chicken, barbecue, ramen, and more. Which eventually included... Pizza-makers, both with serious culinary backgrounds and without , who started taking deep dives into slices using carefully chosen great ingredients (taking a stance that many of the classic slice joints either never did or had abandoned). Part of that stance being...

, who started taking deep dives into slices using carefully chosen great ingredients (taking a stance that many of the classic slice joints either never did or had abandoned). Part of that stance being... A mastery of fermentation—the process by which yeast and bacteria break down flour, yielding complex flavors and various textures in the crust.

Take Frank Pinello, who may be one of the best examples of this convergence of most, if not all, of the points above. When he opened Best Pizza in 2010, it set the standard for what I and my like-minded pizza obsessives have come to call the "revival slice shop"—that is, an establishment that specializes in selling pizza by the slice, the old-school way, but with particular attention paid to the ingredients used and the techniques employed.

Since then, we've seen other revivalist spots open, such as Williamsburg Pizza, which has grown from one outlet to a mini empire based on pizzaman Nino Coniglio's manically obsessive efforts. We've watched brothers Mike and Pete Bergemann, in partnership with Ivan Orkin (of Ivan Ramen fame), open Corner Slice, serving their own unique take on Sicilian pizza made from artisan flour.

And, taking it to the next level, and maybe even full circle, we now have Scarr Pimentel, who developed his pizza-making chops at Lombardi's over 10 years, making pies at Scarr's Pizza. Scarr's is a studiously hole-in-the-wall slice joint on Orchard Street, a half mile away from Pimentel's previous gig, where, get this, he makes dough partially from flour he mills himself. (The obsession with flour and dough is typical of the revivalists: Find a celebrated new-school pizza maker these days, and chances are they're also well versed in bread-making techniques.)

We're in a fundamentally different era of slicedom from the time when I wrote that Times piece, or even when I wrote my pizza book, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, which was first published in 2005. To fully capture this moment in the evolution of the slice, I enlisted a couple of co-conspirators, Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener, both of whom share my passion for the slice.