25 best pizzas around the country

What an interesting article, Pamela.  Thanks for posting that :) (woo, Sally's and Pepe's!)

Thanks for the article.  Makes me want to forget my sweet pita bread and go for the mighty pizza instead!

Wow - it was actually listed!  I'm impressed.  I've got some friends who have a summer home a few doors down and on occasion they'll bring up a Buddy's pizza.

Maybe they'll surprise me this weekend, since the summer season officially begins.

(She says in a zombie-like tone!)

I got Reinhart's "American Pie" for my birthday a few weeks ago. I'm definitely going to whip up some pizza here very, very soon.

I did not love the article.  My mother says of christmas decorations that there are no bad ones, but some are better than others, and that is basically how I feel about pizza.  His tone was cheeky overall, but I thought that the author was a bit dismissive of neapolitan.  Sure, it's become a favorite of mine, so maybe it's just a matter of somebody criticizing my religion, and although I have never experienced the level of pretentiousness he describes from some of the pizza chefs, I can see it would be pretty comical.

With that said, I recently had pizza from Punch, a small local chain of neapolitan places in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, and  think it may have been the best I've ever had.  One of the keys was the olive oil that was so derided in the article.

This is part of a realization I have had recently.  American style pizza (or styles of pizza, as there are several) use the cheese as a layer to separate the sauce from the other toppings.  In neapolitan pizza, the cheese, which is used more sparingly, melts into the sauce and makes it into a cream sauce.  For years I tried to prevent this, and one day it hit me that this was the point!  So the cream in the article makes a certain amount of sense to me, and the olive oil, well, let's just say that it blew my mind.

To me, neapolitan pizza is like vanilla ice cream.  Some people see it as a base for something else, or as boring.  But if it is done really well, it's so good that you can't stop talking about it (which was the case for me and this pizza from Punch).  I cringe when I hear someone talk about "plain" pizza.  My reaction is always, "Dude, if you're calling it plain, you ain't doing it right."

But I do think that it is not productive at all to talk about "best" pizza, only what we each like.

I copied down the names of all 25 just in case!  Since pizza is relatively inexpensive it wouldn't be a huge extravagance to visit some of these restaurants if/when I get to travel.  I might be going to the Bay area this fall so all of the CA bakers out there will have to let me know if they have been to any of the ones in San Francisco.

Summer