Just curious. I’ve had many different chain and local yokel pizzas and self proclaimed pizza experts always claim their local mom and pop joints have the real pizza to die for but when I try it and it’s just pizza. Nothing “Wow” about it and in many cases the small joints actually have inferior pizza to the chains.
I ate a pizza once in the early 80’s from an Italian restaurant in Bethesda MD that tasted different from any other pizza I had ever eaten. It was all fresh herbs and sauce and was square and kinda small and pretty expensive but it was amazing (to me) but now I’ve forgotten the name of the place.
Boosterism and bloviating aside is there* truly *a transcendent pizza anywhere that puts the rest of the pizza universe in the shade?
Come to New Haven, Connecticut sometime and visit the triumvirate (Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, Sally’s Apizza and Modern Apizza). All three are excellent and among the top-rated pizzerias in the world. And the youngest of them dates from 1934.
I understand that there’s pretty good pizza in other places as well. Even way out west in Phoenix, Arizona.
Yeah, one of my first truly transcendent pizza moments was the margharita and rosa at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix.
I’ve had a number of such moments at various places. Grimaldi’s in NYC was probably the first for me. Buddy’s for Detroit-style pizza. Coalfire here in Chicago and, more recently, Forno Rossi. Burt’s deep dish at Burt’s Pizza (Burt passed away last year, sadly, but his place lives on.) The beef & giardiniera at Vito & Nick’s. Maria’s Pizzeria in Milwaukee for their curious, oddly shaped, but distinctly Midwestern thin crust.
There’s no one pizza I could say is better than any other where I’ve had this feeling, although that first bite of Pizzeria Bianco’s margherita was absolute perfection. Unfortunately, while still very good every time I’ve been there since (maybe 8 times), only that first moment felt truly transcendental, like it was the pizza I had been waiting my whole life for.
There certainly is. A transcendent pizza would be one greater than any other pizza, and existence is a greater property than non-existence, so the perfect pizza therefore does exist.
I haven’t tried every pizza on Earth, but I have eaten Pizza Delizza’s pizza on a day after I’ve been stuck in a snowed in hotel room, and then been locked out of the snowed in hotel room, had difficulty getting the management to let us back in, and there was a very active child involved with no snow pants and arrgh…
And the pizza made me happy. What more can you ask of a pizza?
Dunno if there is – or can be – a “world’s best,” but every so often, I’ll try something new, that knocks my socks off.
I recently had a pesto pizza that amazed me. And a place I know has a really spiffing BBQ sauce pizza. (These may be old hat to some of you guys, but they were completely new to me!)
There may not be an absolute best – but there are better and better and better!
They still make an excellent pizza, but a place called Café Pino has replaced them in our (my wife and I) book. Pino’s pizza is the essence of what pizza should be - fantastic crust, simple, fresh ingredients, cooked in a wood-fired oven. The ironic thing is that they are run by French ex-pats.*
Their T-shirt says “since 1957,” and I asked one time how long they had been in Phoenix, since I didn’t remember them from when I first moved out here. The owner told me that their family had owned a pizza place in Paris since 1957. We vacationed in Paris 3 years ago, and as we were walking down the Champs Elysee, we passed a restaurant called “Pizza Pino.” I thought that was curious, so I took a photo of it, and brought it with me when we went to Café Pino the next time. I showed it to the manager, and he said “that’s my parent’s place - can I have the photo?,” and I gave it to him. That location must be worth a fortune - it’s a corner spot about 4 blocks from l’Arc du Triomphe.
You have to try pretty hard to make a bad pizza, but some pizzas are definitely still better than others, and some pizzas are a lot better than others.
I’ll have to check it out. I feel like Bianco’s has changed a bit since Chris stopped working there (I think he had health issues?) and since they went to having lunch service in addition to dinner service. I feel like the dough has been crisper and drier and not quite as “delicate” as it was before. I think some diners may prefer it this way, but I like it the way I had it the first two or three times I’ve eaten there. Still, I can’t go to Phoenix without visiting Bianco’s for the Rosa. I wanted to try Pomo’s last time out, but never got around to it. I’ll keep Pino in mind when I come next time.
An easy way to answer the question: Place a slice of Papa Murphy’s and a slice of almost any other pizza next to each other. Notice that one does NOT have a cardboard crust or pools of grease or inedible chewy bits on it? It doesn’t take much to elevate shit pizza to something you dream about.
I find pizza tastes better when you’re very hungry, and drinks taste better when you’re thirsty.
That may sound stupidly obvious, but most of the time we consume food only when it’s meal time. Adding actual hunger to the mix makes a big difference.
I once did a long (50+ mile) bike ride with a friend, and he ended up getting 6 thorn-holes in his tire, and I only had five patches. So, we were stuck in Fountain Hills waiting for a friend with a truck to pick us up. We were both famished after the ride, and went to a local pizza place, where we had to wait for another 30 minutes to get seated. When our pizza finally came, we both thought is was the best pizza we had ever eaten (literally). I went back to the restaurant some moths later, and I thought that the pizza was just “good.” So, being ravenous clearly affects perception.
It’s considered to be true neapolitan pizza and the restaurant touts the following:
Wood Fired Only Stone Oven
San Marzano Tomato from Mt. Vesuvius
Fresh Bufala or Cow Milk Mozzarella
Marble Deck to roll Pizza out on
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Fresh Basil
Caputo Blue Flour
And OMG is it divine!
I do love a good pizza, but this place is definitely superior to my previous favorites. Hard to describe why, but my mouth knows it to be true.