It’s no secret that the privilege of putting cheek to one of the roughly 100  seats in the dining room at Brooklyn-based Roberta’s restaurant comes with an average two and a half to three hour wait on most nights of the week. In its four-plus year Morgantown tenure, Roberta’s has played host to guests such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Lou Reed, America Ferrera and Maggie Gyllenhaal to name a few, and was featured in the season two finale of HBO’s hit series Girls.

But one thing that isn’t so well-known is how the restaurant became so popular, and that its reputation is one built on the backs of an extremely dedicated and diverse crew. As a result of their tireless efforts, both the restaurant and the neighborhood surrounding it have been exploding exponentially with popularity in recent years.

Take for example, Cal Egan. About a year and a half ago, Egan came to Roberta’s as an apprentice, a position which presented itself organically almost immediately after he arrived in the city from Ohio.

“The first week I moved to New York, I met Max Sussman, and he agreed to take me on as [an apprentice],” said Egan.

When he arrived, he found himself tucked into a nook far from the bustle of the front of the house, among the quiet crew of bakers and the pizza dough rollers across the sprawling lawn of Roberta’s back yard.

While in his whites, he would meticulously prepare the wide variety of ingredients that together compose the constantly refreshed menu for the restaurant. He would spend hours standing in one place, required to focus on grueling task after grueling task, 40 hours per week with no pay. He had no other job at the time, and had to improvise when it came to his living situation.

“I lived in a hallway, for free, in Crown Heights,” he confessed sheepishly.

Egan said he and his comrades were tasked with, “A lot of very labor intensive work that line cooks generally don’t have time for especially in a really busy restaurant like this one.”

But rather than begrudge his dues-paying, he seemed to embrace it, his eyes reflecting pride only for a split second, a badge he would never presume to display on his wide, woven suspenders.

He remembers, “Cleaning a lot of mushrooms, making some pastas, prepping lots of vegetables, sometimes prepping a lot of meat for special events, maybe; helping everybody break down their stations at the end of the night. And dealing with the handling and putting away of all the different ingredients; making sure everything is labeled well; putting together some recipes.”

It wasn’t until several months later, after Egan had completed his apprenticeship, that he found himself seeking a paid position within the restaurant.

“I took a job with another chef and opened a restaurant in New York. That went really well for a while. Actually, I wasn’t planning on coming back [to Roberta’s], but my situation changed very rapidly one day at my other restaurant, kind of out of my control, and I needed another job,” said Egan.

He immediately went to Roberta’s and fortunately for him, due to a few recently opened key positions, he struck paydirt.

“[Roberta’s] was the first place I went to because I had contacts here, and because I knew I liked the restaurant a lot, it’s a place I was comfortable with, and I know I am comfortable with the leadership here. And I knew I could learn a lot, that there was a lot I could accomplish here.”

Currently, Egan works five days a week as the head line cook in Roberta’s traditional kitchen, where he helps to keep up a pace not thought possible for a Bushwick restaurant just a few short years ago.

It may seem a bit extreme for a Brooklyn restaurant on a sketchy street in a sketchy hood to have what are basically volunteer workers, and for prep chefs to be clocking 40-hour weeks sans compensation, save a few free beers and the hope that  the daily 4 p.m. staff “family” meal will still be hot and ready when there is finally time to slip away and scarf some of it down (a tradition which in and of itself has raised curiosity from international foodie coutourists and their philophilic publications).

As it stands, there is no denying that Roberta’s restaurant has become a powerhouse in the New York scene over the course of the last four years; from its humble BYOB beginnings to its current status as a Michelin-rated restaurant, employees across the board report that there has never been any question as to how high the standard must be set, with this holding true for all aspects of the culinary process.

Further, it is a point of pride for every single employee of that restaurant to keep them high. And where possible, to raise them.

That is why Morgantown, a forlorn factory district on the southwest corner of Bushwick that has teetered time and time again on the brink of being forgotten, has become a bucket list-worthy place to see and be seen on the scene.

Residents both new and old seem to share an awareness of the basic timeline of events in the recent history of Bushwick that have led to its current cultural centerhood. One thing most accounts of the story share include a part about how soon after Roberta’s opened up, things really started to turn around.

Sarah Booz (said, “bose”) has been a resident of the neighborhood since May 1, 2005, when she moved into an awkward two-bedroom railroad near the then desolate  and now somewhat foreboding Halsey stop of the L train at 20 years old.

Currently, she is a bartender and karaoke host at Pine Box Rock Shop, a place seldom frequented by the Roberta’s crowd, something Booz credits to the cliquey nature of the neighborhood.

“Wreck Room people hang out at Wreck Room, Life Cafe people hang out there, Roberta’s people hang out there and at The Narrows, TuTu’s and, well, pretty much everywhere but Pine Box,” said Booz.

Even before moving to the neighborhood, though, she spent a decent amount of time in Bushwick hanging out with friends who lived in the McKibbin lofts, as are known a pair of buildings across the street from each other on McKibbin Street about a block north of Bushwick Avenue.

“Back then, you couldn’t get off at the Morgan stop,” said Booz. “I would get off at the Montrose stop and my friends would meet me there. They would always have to walk me there, and if it was late at night, I would just crash.”

After living off the Halsey stop for a year, Booz moved back to her mother’s for six months before finding another apartment off the Dekalb stop, where she stayed for five years.

“When I first lived at my apartment on Dekalb, there was this one time that I was walking home and this group of high school kids threw a chunk of ice and it hit me in the back of the head. Hard,” said Booz. “But you know, instead of turning around and talking to them, being all like, ‘oh my god you hit me what should I do,’ you know, I just kept walking. I was the only white girl in the neighborhood back then.”

Booz recalls a game she used to play in those early days, of what some would call gentrification and others would call integration, that she dubbed, “Who’s going to get mugged before me?”

At that time, there really wasn’t much to do in the neighborhood. It was 2006, and basically, said Booz, all that was open for nightlife was King’s County, the Wreck Room, Life Cafe, which is now just called 983 (its address on Flushing Avenue), and Northeast Kingdom.

It wouldn’t be until the next year that Roberta’s moved in, ushering in what Booz referred to as “the end of the first wave” of the Morgantown turnaround.

“It didn’t happen right away, but when Roberta’s came into the neighborhood – and at first it wasn’t this huge restaurant that it is now, you know, with the radio station and the nice yard – all of the sudden it was like, ‘hey there’s a place right down the street that is really cool and they have awesome pizza. Just awesome pizza.’ So we all started going there,” said Booz.

“Then,” she went on, “after a couple of years, more and more places started opening up. Brooklyn Natural was always there, but you had Pine Box Rock Shop, Tandem, The Narrows, Pearls. MoMo’s came in. The Morgan, which sucked and closed and is now TuTu’s, which is amazing. It’s really beautiful what they’ve done there […] Those were in the second wave.”

Along with all the new nightlife and dining attractions came a new infusion of residents to Bushwick, and the slow, steady drip of artists that had already been slinking sheepishly into the neighborhood became a veritable flood of trendies and nowists.

Maya Meissner, a host for Roberta’s restaurant, has been living in Bushwick for three years. She agrees that the pace is quickening on the turnaround.

“The neighborhood has changed very rapidly, especially over the past year,” said Meissner. “My first year year, there were very few restaurants, very few cool places you could go. I lived here but I didn’t do that much in Bushwick. Now, both of my jobs are in Bushwick, I eat most of my meals in the neighborhood, and I’m not buying a monthly metrocard for the next month. Because there’s more here.”

In 2011, Booz moved into a loft across the street from Roberta’s on Moore Street, where she currently resides. It was during that time that she really began to get integrated into the life of the neighborhood. She likened her life on Moore Street to one that might be lived out on a college campus, except without any of those meddlesome classes that get in the way of college social life.

“This neighborhood is just like a campus,” said Booz. “The lofts on Moore, Seigel, McKibbon, The Loom, you know, places like that are the dorms. Bogart Street is like the quad […] It’s a Disneyland for adults. A place where everyone refuses to grow up.”

While Booz is deeply in love with Bushwick as it is now, she feels that the second wave is coming to a close and that a new era is on the verge of collapsing on Morgantown. She attaches the change to more and more frequent appearance of couples with new babies and buns in the oven.

“I know about a couple who have a 14-year-old girl that grew up in the McKibbin lofts,” said Booz. “That kid has to be nuts. Could you imagine?”

Booz explained that she sees a third wave coming into Bushwick as something that will find the young rebels who settled into escapist lifestyles emerging from their communal living spaces not as individuals, but rather as couples with kids and kids on the way; a time when the sidewalks are soon likely to become a little bit too clean, and the rent a little bit too high for the kids who are like them but not ready to move on. Eventually, building by building, block by block, it will a different neighborhood altogether.

And while the neighborhood isn’t likely to immediately take a right turn and leave its left side blind, the increased attention on the area has lead to increased tenant demand. People want to be on the inside, living a life like the one lived by Booz and other such locals.

“Lucky for us,” said Booz, “Bushwick is not like Bedford. It’s not built for a strip situation, so what happened in Williamsburg can never really happen here. Although there is Knickerbocker. I mean, there’s only so long that 17 different dollar stores can occupy the same street.”

And expansion is already crawling further and further east, with several bar/restaurant combos cropping up along Wycoff, Irving and Knickerbocker Avenues. And at the center of it all is an always improving, ever-expanding Roberta’s restaurant.

What started as a few dudes staking claim in an abandoned factory, armed with nothing but a single red oven, the unrelenting dream of perfect pizzas and a pellet gun for scaring away giant, pear-shaped rat shadows after dusk.

Roberta’s pizza has been served all over the Eastern U.S. in the last few years, with one of its seasonal mobile operations deployed in Manhattan’s Mad Square Eats at the intersection of Broadway and 5th Avene and another in the Meatpacking District.

Last weekend, Roberta’s ran two ovens side-by-side at the Great Googa Mooga festival, serving around 1,400 pizzas per day. One of the mobile operations managers even said there are tentative plans for Roberta’s to make a strong return to Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee, where last year they served pizza non-stop for two and a half days.

And it is now safe to say that the next stop for Roberta’s pizza is an unlikely one for those who are familiar with the name: The frozen foods aisle of high-end grocers.

Still, while the restaurant and the neighborhood it calls home may be mainstreaming these days and new visitors are welcomed with open, if extremely busy arms, the assistant manager of Roberta’s pizza kitchen’s day shift team, Mike Zorman, had a warning for would-be diners.

“Be apprehensive,” said Zorman, speaking of how to behave upon entering the neighborhood. “It’s not as safe as you think it is.”

Booz also felt that visitors and new residents should be wary when in Bushwick.

“I have three rules for living in this neighborhood. Put your phone away, take out your headphones and get to know your bodega guy,” she went on. “I tested that theory once. There was this crackhead who started following me around, and so I went to my bodega and started pounding on the door. Since he knew me, he let me in. It turns out the guy just wanted a light, but still.”

Zorman’s assertion was fortified by his friend and boss, Aaron Butkus, who said simply of the matter, “It’s still Bushwick.”