From my seat at the bar of the popular Crown Heights pizzeria Barboncino on Memorial Day evening, I could see Jared Berrien, a pizza chef, or pizzaiolo, who has worked at Barboncino for about a year, stationed outside of the restaurant’s wood-fired hearth. Berrien told me that the volume of orders that come in on a night like this one makes the work resemble an assembly line. I could see he wasn’t wrong: between delivery orders and in-person dining, it was hard to keep track of the number of pizzas he was plating.

“After doing prep work and rolling dough at the start of a shift, I’ll plant myself in front of the oven or toss out dough for the next five to seven hours,” says Berrien. “I’ll be in one spot the entire time, only running off the line to get water or go to the bathroom.”

A week before my visit, workers at Barboncino — both those in the back of the house like Berrien and those in the front, the servers and bussers and bartenders like Mike Kemmett, who flitted from one end of the bar to the other on Monday night, mixing cocktails and helping patrons decide which of the restaurant’s many pizzas to order — filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which is one of the ways workers can organize a union. Organizing with Workers United, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate that is behind the Starbucks union drive, the Barboncino workers hope to become the first stand-alone unionized pizzeria in New York City.