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A pizza with garlic, fresh cream, tomato and fresh herbs is pulled from the ovens at Great Lake Pizza in Andersonville , Illinois , on August 13, 2009.

The next time you find yourself walking along the streets of Andersonville, Ill., the next time you are strolling down Clark Street and your day is going so well that you could afford a little anxiety, turn onto Balmoral Avenue, lined with thin trees and spotless metal benches and storefronts so seemingly set decorated you could shoot a Katherine Heigl movie without lifting a finger. Here, you'll find a microscopic pizza place, wedged between a French bistro and a loving-worn shoe-repair shop.

"That's it," people whisper, over and over, intrigued though inevitably conflicted, as if the best pizza joint in America, which Great Lake has been called lately, and called loudly, should throw off beams of sunlight.

Then they inevitably do the hand-weighing thing, balancing the pros and cons of committing. And with that a pizza often glides through the wood-framed front door, which slams back on its springs, and that pizza, held aloft by its server, usually circles the table once before gently landing like a feather. One recent Wednesday night, I watched this ritual a couple of dozen times. The pizza arrives, the tired-looking patrons sigh, stop their conversation, stare a moment, as if witnessing a mirage, then reach in. And each time, the pie, on appearance alone, is Gourmet-cover exquisite, its crust pocked with huge, blackened dunes of dough, its interior a bubbling riot of autumnal whites and deep yellows and emerald greens and rusty browns.

Then, invariably, someone — in line, at the counter, on the sidewalk — complains.

Indeed, complaining about Great Lake has become as much a part of Great Lake as eating at Great Lake. Lydia Esparza, who co-owns Great Lake with her husband, Nick Lessins, is remarkably mild in temper for a person who has become the focus of anger four days a week. Think a combination Earth mother and Velma from "Scooby-Doo." She stands behind her counter blinking patiently, defusing the exasperation of (by her estimate) the 30 percent of customers who get mad. Understandably mad. Waits for pizza can stretch 90 minutes; waits for a table can take hours. Even then, occasionally, they run out of dough and stop taking orders at 8 p.m.

So placid is Esparza, however, it can drive a person nuts. You can see how some regard it as arrogance. She says it's a defense mechanism, a way to keep her head in the face of a demanding public, something she has become familiar with in the weeks since GQ magazine named Great Lake the home of the finest pizza in the country.

Which is a kind way of saying it's incredibly slow, like evolution slow, like in the time Lessins takes to make a pie, critic Alan Richman wrote, "civilizations could rise and fall, not just crusts."

But — and here's the truly remarkable thing about Great Lake — Esparza and Lessins intended it this way. The leisurely pace, the short hours, the refusal to add seats, the shortages of dough.

They are an anomaly in the restaurant business: They are not gentle about whom they offend, and will not hesitate to say they think Chicago has some of the worst pizza in the nation, and some of the worst customers. And, by the way, they add, despite what you've heard, the customer is not always right. But they didn't set out to upset anyone. Just, they say, to make incredible pizza, every time, no matter the expectations. What they hadn't anticipated were people driving in from Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, the tourists who have cabs swing by en route to O'Hare. What they hadn't anticipated was a demand so constant they can no longer accept phone-in orders. Since the GQ article hit, so big have those demands become, and so intense the pressure that Esparza and Lessins say they've had offers for public relations help.

But Lessins doesn't want a PR person. He wants to run a restaurant with 14 seats, stay open four days, make his food, then go home and sit down with the dog and read the newspaper.

"I think we're making a statement about quality of life," Lessins said. "We don't want to feed you as quickly as we can — to crank people in and out. It's not about speed. But people have a warped perception of what eating out means. They expect an unlimited supply of what you make. The truth is, nothing good is unlimited. The crime here is: Why are we responsible for feeding quality pizza to this city? Every neighborhood should have a place like Great Lake. Then we wouldn't have the masses descending on us from states beyond and every suburb."

Actually, Esparza said, "Our biggest struggle is not with the demand. It's with people who come in here and want us to morph into what the culture has become. But, you know, in their defense, it's not their fault. Someone has always told them yes."

Which brings us to the woman who demanded pizza immediately — who told Esparza to go back there and make her one now — now. Esparza said no. The woman swore loudly that she would write a bad review online. Then, faced with Esparza's puckered stare, she told them to keep their pizza and headed for the door. She glanced at a table of eaters who had paused mid-chew.

Maggie Will, who lives down the block and considers herself a friend of the couple, as many in the neighborhood do, said she feels for them. "They take time to create something memorable," Will said. "But it's hard. The world doesn't have time for people like them."

"What they are doing is admirable," said Phillip Mott, who teaches restaurant management at Kendall College and who co-owned Le Francais in Wheeling, Ill. "The temptation for any restaurant in their position is to take advantage, expand. But it seems success means something different to them. They go against everything you're taught in this business about speed, whether the customer is right. It is an admirable stance, and the quality backs them up. But how do you become a regular? How do you feel the sense of ownership you feel with a favorite restaurant? You can't have a life and be a regular there!"

The moment I realized Nick Lessins may never win over Chicago entirely was the night I stood beside him for hours and watched him place pepperoni (bought directly from Salumeria Biellese in New York City) on the pizza he was making. It was not unlike watching that scene in an action movie when the hero must decide between cutting the green wire or the red wire. The tops of Lessins' boots were white with flour, his apron even whiter. He pulled a softball of dough from a 1-liter container and worked it in concentric circles, letting the weight take over and the dough jump in his hands. Next he spread it out on a paddle, tugged at the edges, then moved to the sauce, spreading slowly. He placed chunks of mozzarella, moving around the pizza, towering over the top to ensure each piece was properly spaced; then he patted each. He placed the slices of pepperoni as if the pie were made of a highly unstable material, deliberating, ensuring that only the edges touched.

Lessins has made every pizza since Great Lake opened in February 2008. He said he has awakened in the middle of the night with the sickening sensation that there is still a pizza in his oven and it needs to come out now or it'll lose "that aggressive char." The oven, a single stainless steel Montague Hearthbake with 2-inch walls, is small but custom-made, its door already turning the color of caramel, a light brown blooming across the front.

Dear God — actually, God doesn't make pizza this good, or crusts this varied in char, with a light chew. If anything has been lost in the arguments that have broken out over Great Lake, ironically, it's the pizza, which is hard to argue. They serve three pies, which change daily, depending on what ingredients the couple finds around town, and because they haven't owned a car in 10 years, the menu is often dictated by what Lessins brings home on his bike. Homemade pancetta. Spring onion. Mona, a sheep milk-cow milk cheese blend. As fancy as it sounds, the result is a simple pie full of smoke. Indeed, though customers often think Lessins makes a Naples-influenced pie — with wheat flour, very high heats and a thin crust — the real lineage is the artisan pizza movement of recent years, "which is more of a bread movement," said Peter Reinhart, a widely regarded bread baker and author of "American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza."

In fact, that artisan movement, to varying degrees, extends to a number of Chicago restaurants serving food traditionally thought of as cheap and without fuss. The more popular share remarkable similarities with Great Lake. Kuma's Corner (tiny kitchen) takes an hour to make a hamburger. Hot Doug's (sheer demand) has two-hour waits for hot dogs.

Barry Sorkin, who opened Smoque BBQ a few years ago on Pulaski Road in Chicago, started with four business partners committed to the "slow and low" style of Texas barbecue — meat cooked at a low temperature over a longer-than-normal time. And Smoque took off immediately, serving 600 people a day. That said, he also watched lines stretch out the front door and began running out of food at 5 p.m.

"At that point we made a conscious decision not to do anything different," he said. "We didn't have to make that choice. But the hard truth is sometimes you stand by what you believe, and it works. And sometimes you stand by your way, and it doesn't sustain you. The question that hangs over Great Lake is big, and something I've been through — it's whether how you do what you do is viable in the long run. And, more importantly, how much longer will people put up with it?"

Lessins and Esparza, both 45, met at Wayne State University in Detroit. Both studied interior architecture. Later, Lessins, who studied water management in graduate school, worked for water resource firms and environmental groups. Esparza worked for architectural firms, then as a designer for Herman Miller (until being laid off, four months after they opened Great Lake).

"The thing is," she said, "the older you get the more control you start to wish you had over your life." They lived in Chicago about 20 years ago, then moved to the Southwest and traveled awhile. In 1997, they moved back to Chicago and decided to start a business. They were big home cooks, so Lessins spent seven years researching and taking small-business courses.

Esparza started to think about the small central Mexican village where her parents grew up. "People would hover around a grill. You would get the whole neighborhood. They would sit around and wait and talk and drink, and you never questioned what you were getting, or even worried about when." She also said they missed the classic American mom-and-pop, the quirky local joint that operated by its own rules. And when they opened, at first, they were an Andersonville thing, and they stayed that way for months, building a loyal following. Then GQ came.

The article arrived in late May. Then Food & Wine magazine, in June, included them in an article on "The New Pizza Artisans." Chicago's restaurant community began to stop by. An assistant of Oprah Winfrey's came by to pick up pizza for Winfrey to eat on a flight to Africa. And then people began to inquire about valet parking.

Ari Weinzweig, who co-founded Zingerman's Deli 27 years ago in Ann Arbor, Mich., said he received a call from them not soon after the media attention. Zingerman's never expanded beyond its college town despite decades of national recognition and pleas for franchises. "They wanted advice," he said. "How much does one stay aligned with what one believes is something everyone gets? But do they change because some people don't like how they operate? If Nick doesn't like making pizza, if it's no fun, then the customer suffers too. We talked about all this. The truth is, it's easy to give a lot of easy solutions. But, you know, those generally don't work."

The lease at Great Lake is up in about a year and a half, and Lessins said, "We're not sure what we're going to do." They could stay, or relocate to a more inaccessible area, or leave Chicago altogether. "We have a lot of happy customers, but we get a lot of customers who are disappointing to us," Esparza says. "I think you get beaten up one too many times and you grow defensive and protective. We wonder if Chicago is the right city."

When I asked Lessins if he regretted the GQ article, he paused a long time, then said not really. In the long run, it provides options. At the moment, it has become a headache.

I called Richman. I explained what had happened in the wake of his article. He said he felt bad. "But, you know, you can't feel that bad. Years ago I worked at the Boston Globe and wrote about this tiny place with steamed hot dogs over the border in Maine, and they got so much attention that the owner called the Globe and demanded a retraction. It's nuts. I mean, what are you going to retract? What do you say? 'This newspaper incorrectly stated that their food was amazing'?"

If there's a single thing that has changed about Great Lake in the weeks since Richman's article, it's not the food, and it's not even the crowds. Rather, it's a sense of show me — a palpable prove it that hangs over the heads of half the customers, an almost barometric pressure to perform. One weekend night, I waited two hours for a table. A pizza sailed past coated in mozzarella, a bed of fresh-shucked corn kernels, and the lightest chorizo I have ever tasted. It did not look like just a pizza, and the smell was pure cream, enough to make you swoon.

A woman standing with her friends said: "Looks like a pizza." Then she shrugged. Glasses swirled with wine, conversations chattered, but almost no one ate. Because there was no pizza out yet. Justin Hook and Tim Stopulos, both in their 20s, said this was their third or fourth attempt, that every other time Lessins ran out of dough before they could order. Stopulos said, "But you hear that it's the best pizza in America, and your expectations don't get much higher."

I thought of a night in June, clustered on the sidewalk with three friends, three hours ahead of us. We were hungry but wavered, doing the hand-weighing thing, balancing the pros and cons. Then a man burst from the door, his face expressionless, his voice big and clear. "Worth it!" he shouted out, to the whole street, cutting a path toward Clark. We sighed, then we stayed.