This stellar suburban pizzeria has sold out every night. Now, it’s closing.

Some pizza parlors operate amid a blizzard of social media hype. Not Apizzeria 888 in Elkins Park, which opened a year ago on Old York Road near Church Road.

Sebastian Besiso has done his best to keep his one-man takeout operation hard to find.

The blinds are drawn, the windows are blocked, and the door is locked. He makes fewer than 40 pizzas a night. Reservations are essential. It’s pickup-only. There’s no Grubhub, after he smashed the order tablet in frustration on his first night. There’s no sandwich menu. He tried cheesesteaks but dropped them.

Yet after selling out every night he was open, he is pulling the plug. Oct. 18 will be the finale. Attorneys for Besiso and his landlord confirmed that he was released from his lease after a dispute over the building’s condition.

“It’s heartbreaking, especially after everything I’ve put into this place,” Besiso said. “888 proved something to me. An idea that looked almost impossible on paper worked: one person operating a full brick-and-mortar pizzeria — not a basement, garage, or pop-up — selling roughly $30 14-inch cheese pizzas and selling out every single night I opened, without exception and without ever working with a single influencer.” Though the shop turns out fewer pizzas than most, it has earned a 4.9 Google rating from more than 1,000 reviews.

I doubt you’ll find a crispier, thinner crust around Philadelphia than Besiso’s Sofia Romana. This is pizza pushed nearly to its structural limit. A typical 14-inch New York pizza starts with a dough ball weighing 13 to 14 ounces. Besiso’s weighs 7.

That’s a stretch.

The crust almost shatters with each bite, yet holds up beneath the cheeses and toppings, including beef pepperoni. One pizza-geek friend says it has the cracker-like crispness of tonda Romana and the irregular outline and foldability of New Haven apizza.

For now, Sofia Romana, his classic pie, will be available every day, and he may also offer one or two other pizzas each day. He’s extending hours for his final days: 4 to 7:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 2:30 to 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

As it’s still a one-man shop, he will not do walk-ins. Reservation requests are accepted daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at least a day before pickup. He wants customers to text their name to 213-994-0664 (the Los Angeles area code is correct) or call and leave a voicemail. Besiso will respond between 8 and 10 the evening before the requested pickup to confirm the reservation. For same-day requests, the voicemail will indicate whether he’s sold out. If he still has pies available, he’ll pick up the phone.

Chatting with Besiso while he works is part of the experience. His workstation is a marble slab in front of a 60-year-old Blodgett gas deck oven with a missing knob.

You can’t be in a hurry. Besiso spends a good 10 minutes stretching the dough until it’s nearly see-through. Then the pizza goes through a series of bakes, starting with an initial blast of heat that puffs the crust before he adds the cheese and toppings.

The crust is exceedingly thin but not frail. Its underside emerges handsomely mottled, with dark freckles and broad patches of golden brown. The irregularly risen rim catches a few spots of aggressive char. Despite a generous blanket of cheese — Besiso keeps the blend secret — the center stays firm, and a lifted slice bends without sagging.

Besiso, a chemical engineer who has worked in and owned traditional pizzerias for two decades, treats the shop as a laboratory and a passion project. He says he spent weeks on hybrid fermentation and cold aging, and worked out the precise ventilation pattern in his pizza boxes, punching each hole by hand.

“My engineering background makes me obsessed with questioning things and pushing variables beyond where people normally stop,” he said. “That’s the mentality I want to take into whatever comes next.”

He may not reopen somewhere else, at least not right away. Besiso said he doesn’t yet know what his next big project will be, and doesn’t want to force one. He plans to make limited batches from home, including a Japanese-inspired Neapolitan pizza he’s developing, and to take select catering jobs.

He’ll share updates on Instagram at @888bysebastian.

Besiso said he hopes to find people who share his interest in attempting something new if he takes on another major project. “Financial success is important, but it isn’t my driver and never will be,” he said. “I want financial success to be the result of creating something extraordinary, not the reason for creating it.”