I ended up here when Dan's brother Steve and his friend Steve were in town for one night. We got there pretty early on a weekday (6pm) and was surprised at how crowded it was already. We had to wait about 20 minutes for a table and when we walked it, the place totally packed! Who eats that early in NYC? Tourists. But you know, that's ok. The menu is fairly limited to thin crust pizza (small or large) with your choice of toppings, calzones, and then a couple of salads, that's it. So ordering was pretty easy. We split a large pizza with ricotta cheese and sausage ($28), a house salad ($7.50), and a carafe of red sangria ($28). The salad was good but it was kind of shoved into a small bowl and made it hard to toss and mix the dressing. It was mixed greens with some mushrooms, only 2-3 cherry tomatoes, and LOTS of onions. The best part was the very garlicky dressing on top of it.
Unlike most pizza places that I've been to where the pizza takes for-ever to come out, the pizza came out fairly quickly after we finished our salad. The pizza was huge (8 good sized portions) and I loved the fresh mozzarella as the cheese base instead of the shredded cheese kind. The ricotta was piped on top of the pizza like frosting and it was a great addition to the pizza; soft and and it almost tasted like mashed potatoes. There were some bits of basil and it would have been nice to have had more of it. The sausage was thinly sliced and had great flavor. The crust was thin and crunchy and unlike a lot of thin crust pizza, the sauce and cheese didn't make the bottom of the pizza soggy at all.
Overall, I liked the pizza and I can see how it's a big tourist "trap" with its very "Italian" decor and central location. I still think Roberta's was by far better and really made me fall back in love with thin crust pizza, but Lombardi's is also a good choice if you're looking for a more traditional NY style pizza in the city. One downfall: cash only. Total bill was $24/pp including tax and tip.
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