Everybody who sees a "best pizzas" list immediately decries when their favorite pizza place isn't on the menu. Even when the list in question plainly says something like, "Your favorite pizzeria inevitably will not be on the list, sorry."
As with music, one's favorite pizza joint tends to be the one he or she remembers fondly from youth. Such heartfelt allegiance doesn't make a pie automatically great cuisine or even universally tasty, though -- it just means we all love recalling those carefree days of scarfing down 'za and buzzing to pop tones of yesteryear.
I'm not the only one who thinks so. A commenter had this to say about a blog review of Pizzeria Bianco, a Chicago-style place in Phoenix (I'll bring this around to Bay Area pies in a minute.):
You are absolutely right when you say, "This is not my favorite style of pizza," but the fact that no other pizza on earth has ingredients of comparable quality should be enough to say that IT IS the very best in the world. If it failed short in that very important factor of reminding you of the pizzas you ate as a child, it's only a reflection of the poor pizzas you used to eat.
Face it, children do not have refined taste in food or instinctively critical palates. They will eat any processed fast-food garbage you put in front of them with enough hot oil, butter, salt and/or sugar to saturate the chow with addictive chemical flavors. Common sense.
That much I'll say in defense of writer Alan Richman's recent GQ article American Pie, ostensibly on the 25 best pizza places in the country.
While Richman visited more than 100 ristorantes and sampled more than 300 pizzas, he could not partake in everyone's favorite local pizza-pasta spot, of course. Instead, with an eye (tongue?) toward nouveau cooking in keeping with the magazine's style-bible mission, he investigated both age-old traditions and provocative trends in the cuisine.
Earning a place on the list were three San Francisco pizza places, likely none of them your favorite local pie maker (perhaps Zachary's in Berkeley or Oakland, or Little Star in the Mission District or Western Addition -- both thriving, Chicago-themed joints).
Richman put Pizzeria Delfina at No. 3 for its "panna pie," a frugal purchase that includes heavy cream in the recipe. As he wrote:
If you think about the Italian evolution of cheese for pizza -- mozzarella becoming fresh mozzarella and then becoming fresh buffalo-milk mozzarella, each one richer and milkier than the one before -- heavy cream is the natural expression of where Italians intend to go.
He put Gialina at No. 14 for its "wild-nettle pie," made with pancetta (unsmoked bacon) and provolone. "My friend said the wild nettles reminded her of newly mown artichokes, a lovely if implausible image," Richman wrote.
He put A16 at No. 17 for its "romana pie," which he seemed conflicted about for its anchovies (chopped are OK, whole are not, apparently) and olives (big ones are bad, French Nicoise are fine).
Of the general pizza trajectory in The City, he said:
In San Francisco, the heartland of innovative toppings, I found fresh thyme instead of dried oregano, Taleggio and Fontina cheeses instead of mozzarella (it’s my belief that getting beyond mozzarella sets a pizzamaker free), and a basil chiffonade instead of basil leaves. A pause here to reflect on the misuse of fresh basil by Italians. They seem to think of it as decorative rather than flavorful, and they spread not nearly enough of it on their fabled-but-flawed Margherita pies.
Also, he noted the phenomenon of "Indian pizza in San Francisco (pretty good, although reheated chicken dries out badly, despite the tikka masala sauce)."
Without fail, people immediately sliced at Richman through various online venues with a metaphoric pizza cutter for, yes, not including their favorite pizza places. I have a feeling many of them didn't even finish the article, instead scanning through the list and quickly firing off angry counter-opinions.
In my hometown of Chicago, where pizza is king (please don't tell me how great East Coast greasy cardboard is compared with Windy City deep-dish), a newspaper blog celebrated North Side spot Great Lake pizzeria's topping the list, opening the door for commenters to complain about mediocre Chicago places such as Gino's being left out.
'Cuse me? Vito & Nicks? Hey? Don't be afraid, Mr. GQ guy, of da South Side! Vito & Nick's ain't pretty -- not GQ pretty-- but their pie is.
Posted by: Jake Braekes
The very best pizza..... wait for it.................. Are the ones you MAKE AT HOME!!! We've been perfecting our recipe for 4 years now. We can make a whole pie for about $5.00. you use that thing in your kitchen that gets hot when you turn the knobs on the front. (Plus no 10% stroger/daley tax)
Posted by: ryan greene
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Being a native Chicagoan, I have a warm place in my heart for Lou Malnati's deep-dish pizza, which I get shipped frozen to my door in California but that honestly isn't that fantastic, and Wayne's Pizza, a truly typical takeout spot that simply was close to home and became a tradition out of convenience.
Gotta love those stubby corner pieces, though (a sprawling pie is cut in a grid pattern rather than in long, triangular slices, so you wind up with four crispy edge-bits and a lot of gooey squares).
My dad preferred Jake's Pizza in the next town over, but that's just more of the same cookie-cutter, thin-crust stuff.
By the way, Richman had some ambivalence about Arizona pizza, where coincidentally a high school acquaintance of mine set up a Chicago-style pizza/Italian beef/etc. emporium called Gabio's.
As the GQ article said, regarding the so-called seven types of U.S. pizza:
Finally and most wonderfully comes the American pie, actually a recent phenomenon, probably invented by and certainly popularized by Chris Bianco, the godfather of American pizza, who opened Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix in 1994. The pie he prepares and that others emulate is as much about bread-baking as it is about crust-making ... identified by two vital, distinct, and non-Italian elements: a golden glow and a chewy yet velvety interior.
On the other hand, Richman wrote:
Pizza has become the gourmet food of the recession, and the men who create these pies consider themselves artists -- narcissistic, reclusive artists, at that. These guys find multiple ways of being annoying. At Pizzeria Bianco, a friend and I ordered four pies that we shared with the people who had stood in line with us for more than an hour. Still hungry, I tried to order a fifth, but I was cut off like a roaring drunk in an American Legion hall, told that I had reached my limit.
Most brutally, he said:
I traveled to 10 American cities, the ones I knew had a lot of pizzerias or a lot of Italians. They seem to go together, although less so anymore. Phoenix was easy -- there's precisely one pizzeria, Bianco, that anybody recognizes as worth visiting. I would happily have broken my rule and gone to any other personal favorite -- but nobody had one.
Technically, my high school bud Andy Sidell set up pizza shop in Scottsdale, but that's a harsh indictment of Arizona 'za, right? Here's Sidell's response to the smackdown, summarizing many East Coast pizza fans' feelings:
As Pizzeria Bianco is concerned, it isn't "real" pizza. I call it "foo foo" pizza. More closely related to a California Pizza Kitchen-type pizza or pie.
Pizza in my mind, and I think I can vouch for a lot of Chicagoans and New Yorkers, should be loaded with cheese, meats, some veggies or any combination of the three. Pizzas with goat cheese or "Buffalo cheese," as in the article, would be shunned by people from the two big pizza "empires" (Chicago and N.Y.).
Arizona offers a wide variety of pizzerias that produce an incredible pizza that makes people feel like they are back home. I have had several customers tell me that my pizza is better than some of the pizzerias in Chicago.
The way you make the product, and the ingredients you use, help to create an "authentic" Chicago-style or N.Y.-style pizza.
Oh, snap, so-called style magazine. Take dat dere.
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My blog on Examiner.com is another fount of wisdom.
Hmmm! Your post made me so hungry! I love pepperoni pizza. That’s why I try to cook pizza whenever I have time. What condiments do you put on your pizza? Mine is hot sauce! Because I really think pizza is dull without it.
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