When it’s 104 degrees outside, dinner stops being a fun little decision and becomes a negotiation with your own energy level.
I had been outside too long. I was overworked, overheated, tired, and still had chores waiting at home. Cooking sounded like punishment. So we did the reasonable Oklahoma thing and let somebody else handle dinner.
That somebody was Empire Slice Shop at Mayfair Village in Oklahoma City.
We ordered takeout, picked it up on North May Avenue, went home, turned ourselves toward the air conditioning, and let a 20-inch pizza do what a 20-inch pizza is built to do.
Empire’s Mayfair Village Slice Shop
Empire has been part of Oklahoma City’s pizza scene since the original Empire Slice House opened in the Plaza District in 2013. It became known for oversized New York-style slices, 20-inch whole pies, loud pizza names, and toppings that don’t feel like they were assembled by a corporate spreadsheet.
The Mayfair Village location is Empire Slice Shop, the smaller counter-service version of the concept. That matters on a day like this. I was not looking for a long sit-down meal. I wanted to get in, get pizza, get home, and stop pretending I was going to chop vegetables in August.
This location sits at 4723 N May Ave, in the Mayfair Village area of northwest Oklahoma City. It’s the kind of spot that makes sense for grabbing a slice, but it also works well when you want to take a full pie home and make dinner everyone else’s problem.
The 20-Inch No Sleep Till Brooklyn
We went with the 20-inch No Sleep Till Brooklyn.
Empire’s pizzas are legitimately big. Twenty inches sounds manageable in theory, then the box lands in front of you and you realize you have entered into a serious agreement.
No Sleep Till Brooklyn is the kind of Empire pizza I want when I’m ordering from Empire: New York-style, meat-heavy, direct, and built for folding a giant slice without making a structural engineering project out of it.
The crust is the part that keeps it all from getting out of hand. It’s thin enough that a huge slice still eats like pizza, not like a loaf of bread with cheese on top. That matters when the pie is this large. You can eat a couple slices and feel like you had a good dinner without immediately regretting every choice that brought you to that couch.
And yes, the couch was involved. This was not a tablecloth night. This was pizza box, cold air, and “we’ll deal with the chores after we sit down for a minute” logic.
The Salad Counts, I’ve Decided
We also got the Green Machine salad, because placing a salad next to a 20-inch pizza legally makes the meal responsible. I don’t make the rules. I just benefit from them.
It also worked. A cold, crisp salad next to pizza is one of my favorite combinations in an Oklahoma summer. When the heat has already done enough damage, a fresh salad sounds a lot better than another heavy side.
Empire’s Slice Shop menu covers more than pizza, with salads, appetizers, daily slices, whole pies, beer, wine, and a few options for people who are not trying to go full meat-and-cheese mode. Vegetarian items are marked on the menu, and the shop also lists gluten-free crust and vegan cheese options for certain orders.
That flexibility is useful, but the bigger point for me was simpler: this is a solid neighborhood takeout play when leaving the house sounds bad, cooking sounds worse, and you still want dinner to feel like a small win.
Sometimes the adventure is not discovering a new place or spending two hours at a restaurant. Sometimes it’s getting through an Oklahoma summer day, ordering a giant pizza from a known OKC spot, and eating it at home where the air conditioner is doing honest work.
If you’re around Mayfair Village or North May Avenue, Empire Slice Shop makes sense for exactly that. Grab a slice if you’re moving around, or do what we did and take the 20-inch box home.
The chores will still be there when you’re finished. Unfortunately.
Details
- Address: 4723 N May Ave, Oklahoma City, OK 73112
- Phone: 405-768-4707
- Hours: Sunday-Thursday 11 AM-10 PM, Friday-Saturday 11 AM-11 PM
- Website: https://www.empireslicepizza.com/
