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There is no menu or price list at Oti’. You can’t book and there is limited seating on one bench, tauntingly placed beside stacks of pizza boxes almost covering the front windows.

But few people have time for ingredients, or cost, or the opportunity to park themselves at this pizza and sandwich takeaway shop from executive head chef of Oti’ and Totti’s Mike Eggert.

They’re just hoping to nab a slice of Eggert’s margherita, potato, pork or top-selling, deliberately charred ham and pineapple pizza. Or his seasonal sandwiches, each made with bronzed, hand-stretched Italian-style flatbread schiacciata, Italian for crushed, or flattened by hand.

Customers stand in quiet wonder, pointing at these beauties. A queue winds out the door and along Palings Lane inside the Ivy precinct. We are unruffled by the calm triumph of diners a metre away enjoying the boon of getting a table at Eggert’s Bar Totti.

It’s 5pm and things are serious in this queue. Word is, Oti’, a spin-off from Totti’s, closes when the food runs out. On its first day, in May five-and-half weeks ago, that happened three hours after opening. No one gives up tonight.

Happily, there is plenty for all. Once inside, every pizza slice, laden with rotating ingredients but always formaggio ranging from burrata to stracchino, ricotta and parmesan, is viewable on wooden boards lining a high blue, glass-windowed counter.

The pizza is Roman-style by the slice, meaning thick focaccia-like squares as fat as an airport novel. They carry cured meats, roasted vegetables, fresh herbs, blistered olives and speckles of sea salt.

There are also sandwiches with fillings ranging from cold-cuts to crunchy salad to chicken and semi-dried tomato with pesto. Meats, cut fresh from the counter display, include salami, smoked chicken, prosciutto and beef tongue.

Beyond these beauties is an open kitchen of white-capped chefs and staff working with the tenacity and speed required for a takeaway restaurant frequented by hundreds of people from 11am.

If the concept of takeaway conjures ideas Oti’s pizza slices and sandwiches are an afterthought in Merivale’s food empire, cries of “Yes, chef!” ringing from the kitchen quash that.

It’s a lesson in the intricacies of a culinary career watching these blue T-shirted, white-aproned bods at work. Some wait instruction with nervously attentive faces. Others take customers’ orders with bright cheer, or balance bowing, car bonnet-sized panels of schiacciata through a side door into the alleyway.

Along with Merivale chief executive Justin Hemmes, Oti’ is Eggert’s passion project. The pizza dough comes from Sara Masi and Vincenzo Biondini, who are known for their bread wizardry and it’s a base that excites Eggert greatly.

“It’s delicious,” Eggert says. “Charry, crunchy, doughy but still light. There’s nothing better than big slabs of charred bread covered in fresh toppings.”

Standards are high around the ovens and marble preparation counter, kept from the tiny venue’s previous tenant, retired master pastry chef Lorraine Godsmark.

Which is why it’s not cheap. Four pizza squares will set you back just over $50 and, once you factor in soft drinks from the fridge, things are heading towards a sit-down bill at your average restaurant.

But this is not average takeaway. The pop music-laced bustle and colour of dipping into Oti’ between lunchtime and, on some nights, early evenings, is a drawcard in itself.

You can squeeze onto the bench and eat while watching Eggert’s staff work.

‘Charry, crunchy, doughy but still light. There’s nothing better than big slabs of charred bread covered in fresh toppings.’

Mike Eggert

Or, clutch your blue-and-white pizza boxes and weave through crowds, light rail, traffic and various underpasses to the single park bench on High Street, Millers Point, that overlooks Barangaroo.

There are few places you can view millionaires watching TV inside their 270-metre-high residence above a casino, but this is one of them.

We tuck into rosemary flecked crunchy potato cube-topped slices while a man in a high-up apartment scratches his stomach before a flickering screen inside the Barangaroo skyscraper.

The salami pizza slice, peppery and fragrant, rivals the juicy pork slice-heaped variety and the sparky margherita, glistening with Eggert’s secret red sauce, heat-wrinkled tomato, drifts of freshly grated parmesan and upturned basil leaves.

This is pizza that puts other, cheaper, overly accessorised slices in the dark.

Twinkling ferries move past, the moon slides by and dinner’s cardboard box plates are crushed up and carried away for the compost.