IN an earlier, more primitive era, chefs with an entrepreneurial urge believed that success began with a delicious product. If you cooked something that enough people wanted to eat, you could build an empire that might one day span the country. First, though, you needed 11 secret herbs and spices. You needed special sauce. You needed Hot Doughnuts Now.


It all sounds rather quaint. Thanks to the rise of celebrity chefs, restaurant empires have as much need for a great product as they do for spittoons and a separate ladies’ entrance. To see this new model in action, you need only study Nicoletta, the pizzeria opened in the East Village in June by the chef Michael White and his business partner, Ahmass Fakahany.


It was already clear in March that Nicoletta was to be the first of several places rolled out from the same batch of dough.


“We are developing distinct brands where we can open multiple restaurants, lowering costs as we go,” Mr. Fakahany told a reporter at the time as he explained how practices from his former career as a high-flying executive at Merrill Lynch were helping him wring extra profit from his restaurants.


Nicoletta had been in the works for some time. In December, the two had filed a liquor license application for a corporation known as “Letta # 1 LLC,” a name that had been registered with the State of New York six months earlier.


Marble tables were designed and fabricated, each with a spring-loaded socket in its top. The sockets can anchor pedestals that hold the pizzas several inches off the table.


As for the product on the pedestal, apparently that could wait. About a week before the opening, by some reports, Mr. White was changing his pizza dough recipe almost day by day. He was talking about 12- and 16-inch pies cut in squares, in the style of his home state, Wisconsin.


By the time hosts in Nicoletta T-shirts were stationed out on the sidewalk with clipboards to manage the people willing to wait 90 minutes or more for a table, pies were being cut into the usual wedges, and the 16-inch pizza was history.


As it turns out, even the smaller size may be too much. The servers will tell you that it feeds two people. That may be true if both people are running a marathon the next morning. I was never able to finish one, even with two or three hungry assistants at the table.


Some of this is because of sheer mass. Nicoletta’s pizzas are not quite deep dish, but they are heading in that direction. The crust is as strong as epoxy, and Mr. White piles it up with an abundance of toppings that would buckle an ordinary pie. In thickness and heft, a Nicoletta pizza resembles the September issue of Vogue.


There was another reason my table never finished an entire pizza: we lost interest. The style of pizza Mr. White is pursuing emphasizes gut-stretching abundance over flavor. The pies are overburdened conglomerations of cheese, flour and fistfuls of other stuff; in the end, the elements cancel one another out.


In the Fior di Zucca, zucchini blossoms and watery shredded zucchini were completely engulfed by an ankle-deep carpet of melted mozzarella. It was a vegetable pizza for people who hate vegetables. Not that the addition of undercooked Nueske’s bacon brought much relief to the bleak expanse of starch created by the layer of smashed potatoes on top of the Patatona.


Other combinations were more promising, like the Calabrese, with excellent fennel sausage and curly divots of spicy pepperoni, or the Carbonara, the pasta classic reimagined in pizza form. But that great shelf of crust deadens the taste of any ingredient that gets near it.


Mr. White has said he engineered the dough to stand up to the rigors of delivery and reheating with no loss of quality. In that, at least, he has succeeded. Warmed up a day or two later, a Nicoletta crust is just as stiff and bland as when it was fresh from the oven.


Pizza hunters with long memories will recall another pizzeria founded by an acclaimed chef whose pizza was met, at first, with skepticism. A decade ago, Mario Batali’s Otto opened with pizzas that were griddled, not baked. At first, they were not encouraging.


The dough was tweaked and tweaked again, but in the meantime you could have a wonderful time at Otto without eating a single slice. The menu offered many other diversions, including full-flavored vegetables, robust pastas, a wine list built for Italy-hopping, and Meredith Kurtzman’s array of gelati, which won cult status and deserved it.


Nicoletta has a far less elaborate gelato menu than Otto’s. There is only one flavor, a house-made vanilla soft serve called fior di latte, but it was consistently the high point of my meals. Creamy and easygoing, it never failed to make me smile, whether topped with amarena cherries, drizzled with blueberry limoncello or left undecorated.


Nicoletta would be a pleasant place to stop for ice cream if only the staff didn’t seem to expect you to order some of the other food first. But they do, and it’s not an uplifting experience, even if you steady yourself with a glass of red wine poured too cold from a tap.


The pizzas, at least, don’t resemble anything else in New York. The salad recipes might have been nabbed from that corner trattoria you stopped going to a few years ago. There is the Nicoletta, with lettuce, red endive and a sliver of focaccia smeared with goat cheese. Or the insalata mare with clams, mussels, squid and octopus, all as tender as an extension cord, all bathed in a dressing that had no effect on any of it.


The snacks and appetizers can have an off-the-rack quality as well. Tender as the meatballs were, is the city really suffering from a shortage?


Nice surprises did pop up now and again, like the suppli fortified with ragù and the cucumbers pickled in white balsamic vinegar that were good enough to sell by the jar.


But on the whole, what is striking about Nicoletta is how little evidence it gives of Mr. White’s prodigious talent for cooking Italian food that can make you dizzy with pleasure.


He has overseen five restaurants that were awarded three stars in The New York Times: Fiamma, Alto, Convivio, Marea and Ai Fiori. (The last two are still open.)


After a run like that, it must have been tempting to think that great pizza would materialize on command. So far, it hasn’t worked out that way.


Nicoletta


FAIR


160 Second Avenue (10th Street), (212) 432-1600, nicolettanyc.com.


ATMOSPHERE The most popular pizzeria in a small Midwestern college town.


SERVICE Helpful, if perfunctory at times.


SOUND LEVEL Moderate.


RECOMMENDED Cucumbers in white balsamic vinegar; ice cream.


DRINKS AND WINE A concise Italian wine list is supplemented by beer and soda.


PRICES Appetizers and salads, $4 to $12; pizzas, $16 to $22.


HOURS Monday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 3 a.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 1 p.m. to 3 a.m.


RESERVATIONS Not accepted.


WHEELCHAIR ACCESS There is a ramp at the entrance on 10th Street and an accessible restroom on the street level.


WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction primarily to food, with ambience, service and price taken into consideration.