Hype. You’ll humor it. Smile at it. Friend it on Facebook. You just won’t believe it. Instead, there’s this. It’s an inspection sheet of sorts. A road test. A canary in the coal mine of New York dining. We call it Due Diligence. It’s dangerous work, but your nights are too important to leave to chance.

The Place: Marta, a palatial new pizza-leaning Italian spot from Danny Meyer and Nick Anderer. It’s now open at the Martha Washington hotel.

The Hype: Roman pizza is about to be the pizza in New York.
The Reality: It’s thin, extra crispy and, in our experience, topped with potato, guanciale, black pepper and pecorino. (Check that out in the slideshow.) You decide.

The Hype: There’s a lot of fire happening.
The Reality: Confirmed. Back behind the marble counter you’ve got two giant wood-burning ovens and the kind of wood-ember grill other grills are afraid of. (Here, it’s cooking up lamb chops.)

The Hype: They’ve got the most serious pizza-place breakfast game in town.
The Reality: We witnessed the boiling-hot birth of a peach-and-candied-walnut-topped pancake, which is made and served in a cast-iron skillet.

Ah, the miracle of life.