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Fire guts original East Village location of Artichoke Basille’s Pizza – Metro US

Fire guts original East Village location of Artichoke Basille’s Pizza

Fire guts original East Village location of Artichoke Basille’s Pizza.

A fire left the East Village location of a popular New York pizza chain severely damaged early Friday morning.

The blaze broke out around 5 a.m. at Artichoke Basille’s Pizza at 328 East 14th Street and spread to the second and third floors of the six-story building, the FDNY said according to the New York Daily News.

The upper floors of the building houses several apartments.

“I could see the light of a fire coming from the back. The amount of smoke was ridiculous,” second-floor resident Samuel Huang told the Daily News. He said the smell of smoke woke he and his two roommates up.

The fire was under control by 6:30 a.m., but no cause has been determined yet, officials said.

This East Village location was the first Artichoke Basille’s opened by cousins Francis Garcia and Sal Basille, who left their family’s restaurant in Staten Island to open their own pizzeria in Manhattan in 2008.

A second location opened in September 2010 in Chelsea and another followed that November on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

Artichoke Basille’s has since opened up offshoots in Astoria, Park Slope, Bushwick and Bay Ridge, as well as inside Terminal C at LaGuardia Airport and in Berkeley, California.

An eighth Artichoke Basille’s location is set to open this year at 70 Pine St. in the Financial District.

Basille and Garcia also host their own show on the Cooking Channel called “Pizza Masters.”

“We are devastated by the fire and saddened that our neighbors have been displaced,” Garcia told Metro via email. “We are grateful the FDNY got the fire under control and are cooperating with officials on their investigation.”