25 best pizzas around the country

Who makes the best pizza on earth? This is the eternal question, the one that must be answered. Because: Round or square, flat or stuffed, thick crust or thin, slathered in pork products or simply covered in cheese, pizza just might be the most perfect food ever invented. Which is why Alan Richman traveled more than 20,000 miles across the U.S.A.— the country that makes it best — in a search for the 25 best pizzas you’ll ever eat.

Italians are wrong. Not about cars or suits. About pizza, and they’re not entirely mistaken about that, only about crusts and buffalo-milk mozzarella. They’ve got the tomato part right. Pizza was created by the Italians — or maybe by the Greeks, who brought it to Naples, but let’s not pile on the bad news. Right now it justly belongs to us. We care more about it. We eat more of it, and unlike the Italians, we appreciate it at dinner, at lunch, and at breakfast, when we have it cold, standing up, to make hangovers go away. Italians don’t really understand pizza. They think of it as knife-and-fork food, best after the sun goes down.

Pizza isn’t as fundamental to Italy as it is to America. Over there, it plays a secondary role to pasta, risotto, and polenta. To be candid, I think they could do without it. Not us. Over here, it’s one of the few foreign foods we’ve embraced wholeheartedly, made entirely our own.

The simple truth is that pizza in its most primal form — cheese, tomato, crust — is perfect food. It’s good for vegetarians, even though it contains no vegetables. It’s good for us meat eaters, chiefly because we don’t care much for vegetables but also because pizza is one of the few foods where the absence of meat isn’t missed. (Although, when I think about it, a little sausage never hurts, especially if it’s crumbled up rather than sliced.)

It’s the absolute best food for sharing (unless you’re in love, in which case we’re talking about an ice cream cone). It’s the healthiest of treats; the strictest mother wouldn’t argue that pizza is bad for kids. It’s the most versatile delivery food, because it reheats much better than Chinese, and if you accidentally burn it, pizza is still good. Most important, at least to me: Pizza gives pepperoni a reason to exist.

Home of Italian pizza
A word here about Naples, the home of Italian pizza. That’s supposedly where the pie reaches its pinnacle, in a distinct and idiosyncratic style that some American pizzamakers — let’s resist calling them pizzaioli, as the Italians do — are trying to emulate. They’re going for hotter ovens, puffier crusts, and weepy buffalo-milk mozzarella on top. I’m not impressed. Not by the genuine pies in Naples, and usually less by American imitations, although the mission has a certain nobility of purpose.

Interactive map Where’s the best slice of pie? See which states GQ editor Alan Richman thinks has the best pizza.

I’ve eaten in Naples. From the ancient, brutally hot ovens emerge pies that most Americans wouldn’t recognize. The crust is charred and puffy in spots but tragically thin and pale beneath the toppings. The sauce is chiefly chopped tomatoes, sometimes fresh and sometimes canned, but almost always vivid and bright. (Those San Marzano tomatoes are as good as advertised.) The cheese is mozzarella, but the Italians are proudest when they can substitute fresh mozzarella from the milk of buffaloes and label their pies Margherita DOC. (It sounds like a wine thing, but it’s also a pizza thing.) In my opinion, buffalo mozzarella is pizza’s second-worst topping, exceeded only by whole anchovies — no hot, smelly fish on my pies, thank you. After that, those pizzaioli guys add oil, lots of it, and more liquid is precisely what tomato pies do not need.

This is what happens when a Neapolitan pie comes out of the oven, after it’s been cooked a remarkably short time: The nearly liquefied glob of buffalo mozzarella — now resembling a snowman melting on a warm March afternoon — has become runny. Water drains from the tomatoes. Oil joins the flood. All that excess liquid has to go somewhere, which is why the bottom crust turns to mush, not that it was ever particularly crispy.

This is why Italians need a knife and fork. This is why our pizzas are better than theirs.

Distinct pies
We have, remarkably, seven distinct kinds of pizza in this country, starting with those Neapolitan imitations that represent style over sustenance. Our most famous (and nonconformist) is probably the Chicago deep-dish pie, essentially a casserole. The crust is sometimes burdened with cornmeal or semolina, and sometimes it is flaky and sweet, like those on fruit pies. It isn’t much like the crust on any pizza outside Chicago, but this style isn’t about crust. It’s about massive amounts of cheese and sauce.

Deep-dish pies became popular in the 1980s when branches of Chicago’s Pizzeria Uno spread everywhere and Americans lined up. It was the last time we felt as strongly about pizza as we do today. I have no recollection of why Americans felt such a need to eat deep-dish pies, although I was elbowing and pushing alongside everyone else. I asked a Chicago friend to remind me, and she said, “They’re carbohydrate-and-cheese bombs. We’d buy a frozen one and throw it in the oven. Two hours later, it was ready.”

She wasn’t exaggerating by much. Indeed, uncooked deep-dish pie is still sold frozen in Chicago, and the instructions say it can be put into the oven that way. Pizza is odd in that its baking times vary widely. What other food sometimes takes two or three minutes to cook and sometimes an hour or more? All my life I’ve wondered about the difference between Chicago’s famous Pizzeria Uno and its almost-as-famous Pizzeria Due, and after traveling there, I found the answer. The numbing wait is one hour at Uno, two hours at Due.

There’s a minor variation on deep-dish that remains fundamental to Chicago: the stuffed pie, number three among the seven distinct species. This is a deep-dish pizza that’s been supersized and topped with a second crust that’s so thin as to be almost invisible. The stuffed pie is the black hole of pizza-eating, thicker than a deep-dish, and when I sat down to eat one, I couldn’t get through a single slice.

More widespread than any of those styles is the pan pizza, sometimes known as Sicilian and sometimes as square. This is a richer, heavier version of focaccia — a soft flat-topped bread prepared with olive oil. Pan pizza is easily at its best in Detroit, where aficionados seek out the corner slices that have caramelized edges blackened through contact with the hot pan. A crunchy bottom, blissfully created by the same process, is also a virtue. Most people, when they think of crunchy pizza, have an unrelated pie in mind, the thin-crusted ones known as Roman-style, tavern-style, or bar pizza. These crusts, at best, have a bit of suppleness; at worst, they are reminiscent of crackers.

The most curious of all pies is grilled pizza, invented at the restaurant Al Forno in Providence, and too wonderful to be dismissed as a regional peculiarity. The idea of grilling a pizza doesn’t sound promising: Dough is put on a (hopefully) charcoal fire, flipped, topped, and grilled some more. This results in crusts far more delicious than the sum of their grill marks, so irresistible I turned to a pizza authority to help me understand. Peter Reinhart, a baker and author, understood my bewilderment. He said, “Basically, grilled pizzas are fried dough. The pizza dough sits in oil, and the oil is seared into the crust. How can you go wrong?”

And then, 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. It’s primarily identified by two vital, distinct, and non-Italian elements: a golden glow and a chewy yet velvety interior. Such crusts have a resemblance to ciabatta, the light and porous Italian bread.

The American pie is more than crust. It is explosively inventive, with toppings as ingenious as American cuisine gets. 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.

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