This moment is sacred, every time: Mark Iacono making pizza behind a marble-topped table at the back of his restaurant, Lucali, in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he has lived his whole life. I watch him work from my seat in the dining room in silence, in reverence, as if sitting in church. Some nights, when my heart is tight, I take the subway from work to stand on the sidewalk outside, to look through the restaurant’s plate-glass window at the same scene to feel the same way: in the presence of a kind of sacrament.

Iacono’s movements are slow, deliberative. I’ve said they resemble a jungle cat’s, grooming. They also resemble a parish priest’s, preparing the Eucharist: rolling his dough with a wine bottle as if ironing linens, stacking the rounds to rest, then pulling them off the pile to stretch. Candles flicker on the table in front of him and on the wall behind him, framing him in immaculate white. Occasionally he looks up, out into the middle distance over the customers sitting before him, not bored but content, perfectly at ease. There is nowhere else he needs to be. This is his pizzeria, his vision, his practice. He stretches the dough, hand to hand, as if meditating, as if performing a rite.

Once the dough is stretched and Iacono has placed it on a peel, things begin to move a little more quickly. The actions are no less meditative and interesting. Iacono’s sauce technique is painterly. He lays a perfect line, of a perfect blood-red and uses the back of his ladle to radiate it out into a perfect circle, infinitely symmetric.

Iacono uses a combination of cheeses on his pies: first a low-moisture mozzarella, and then some dabs of imported buffalo mozzarella on top. This matters to pizza fanatics, who can debate the choices on their merits. It matters to Lucali fanatics as much because each cheese requires a different application, a different movement above the marble. The low-moisture cheese comes first, and I love the way long runs of it emerge from the grater Iacono holds high above the pie, the way the soft shards fall into a rough pile, an imperfect mound atop the perfect circle of sauce.

Then the buffalo mozz! It sits in a bowl to Iacono’s left, near the board of cheeses he uses for calzones and other formalities, bobbing in water, glistening with fat.

It is fascinating how he considers each ball by sight and feel, choosing this-one-no-that-one to tear for each pie. Such consideration is the opposite of rote behavior, the assembly-line nature of many pizza makers. It more closely tracks how a wood worker decides on this piece of ash or oak over that one, to build a cabinet. I once asked Iacono where he got the wood he uses in his oven. He had a pie on a peel and was preparing to slide it into the heat.

Probably I shouldn’t have been talking to him. But customers do so all the time and are sometimes rewarded with a smile, an acknowledgment, a shrug, a line. “Wood store,” he told me, and turned to the oven. I don’t talk in church anymore.

It’s a great little detail of Iacono’s pizza technique that, before he pulls a pie from the oven, he scatters bread crumbs on its aluminum serving tray, to create the smallest of barriers between the hot, crisp dough and the cool of the metal.

The bread crumbs retard condensation on the bottom of the crust. But the showering of them is also theatrical. It draws focus to the imminent arrival of a newborn pie. Something’s gonna happen now.

Transubstantiation? Consubstantiation?

Regardless, for those observing from the dining room or the street outside, the moment at which a Lucali pie emerges from the oven is, somehow, magical, as raw ingredients have been converted by heat into something greater and more holy than before.

Remember the bread crumbs? They do their job. If you’re close enough, at one of the tables nearest where Iacono labors, you can hear the crunch and zippery tear as he cuts the pie once across,

turns it 90 degrees, cuts it again, turns again, cuts again, turns and cuts, before dressing it to send into the world.

The grater is held higher here than with the mozz, and the Grana Padano cheese Iacono uses to finish each pie falls excessively across the surface of the pie. It is a demonstration of excess that will provide a salty bite. You’d think this, ordinarily, the final moment before the serving of the pie.

But no! Before he serves any pizza, Iacono uses a technique he learned watching the great pizza chef Dom DeMarco at Di Fara in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. He adorns the surface of the pizza with an immense amount of fresh-snipped basil, a raw zip above the melting surface of the pie. The process of cutting can seem to take a long time, but it allows the pie to set, so that when it arrives at your table it is exactly ready to eat, not so hot that the cheese is still slipping around, not so not-hot that it has begun to seize up and harden.

In the church they say, right before people take communion, “The gifts of God for the people of God.” Iacono just hands his finished pie to a server, then heads out back to suck down a Marlboro before finishing the nightly service: 70 more pies and half as many calzones. I could watch the making of them forever.