There are pizza nerds, and there are data nerds. Then, there’s Liam Quigley, who’s apparently a little bit of both.

Starting in 2014, Quigley, a native New Yorker and freelance reporter, began logging the price of every slice of pizza he ordered in his home city. Over the next eight years, he logged 464 slices, although that total doesn’t include slices or whole pies that he ordered more than once from the same place. He now has a page on his website that tracks price increases for New York’s slices since the project began and features a digital map showing every pizzeria he ordered from, plus a searchable table for anyone looking for a specific pizzeria that he visited.

Among his findings: the average price of a plain slice increased from $2.52 to $3 between 2014 and 2022. He notes that dollar slices were excluded from his data.

“The biggest thing I have noticed,” he adds on his website, “is the decline in the amount of sauce put on slices. I’m sure this is a cost-saving measure, but the overall quality of your average slice in the city has definitely suffered.”

To keep up with all those slices, Quigley took a photo of each one and posted it on his Instagram account, NYC Slice, along with the pizza joint’s location, the price and the date. “Then, later, I export all that data to a spreadsheet,” he recently explained to Slate. “And then I geolocate, or whatever that expression is, those addresses into latitude and longitude, and then there you go.”

Related: Restaurant sales tapered off in late 2022

He told Slate that he sees a “regular” slice and a dollar slice as two different things, which is why he left the latter out of his data. “I think the average dollar-slice quality has plummeted over the past decade, and, with it, it’s kind of dragged down the average quality of regular slices,” he said.

Like all pizza-loving New Yorkers, Quigley has his opinions about the city’s best slices, but he didn’t rate the individual slices logged on his Instagram account. “That just gets into such a slippery slope with the ratings,” he said in the Slate interview. “I’ve seen some people’s opinions on pizza that I really disagree with, and I’m sure people would disagree with my [opinions]. No one can disagree that the slice costs $1.50.”

However, since he has now concluded the eight-year project, Quigley is ready to publicly share his thoughts on “some of the better slices” he tried. They include Margherita Pizza ($3.75); Ozone Pizzeria($3); Ciro Pizza Café ($2.50); Pizza D’Amore ($2.50); Sam’s Pizza ($3); PG Pizza ($2.75); Joe’s Pizza ($4); Bleecker Street Pizza ($3.64); Pizza Place ($3.25); Big John’s Pizza ($2.75); Mario’s Pizzeria ($3); Sunnyside Pizza ($3.50); and New Park Pizza ($3.25).

In a separate interview with AMNY.com, Quigley said he found the best slices in Queens, followed by the Bronx in second place, and Manhattan and Brooklyn tied for third.

Altogether, Quigley says he spent $1,244.22 on the slices over the duration of the project. But he finally ended the project, he told Slate, because he was simply “tired of it.”

“I was getting tired of eating bad pizza,” he said, “and I think it’s in a good place to close the data down.”