BootsnAll Travel Community

I like to try pizza in every country I visit if I am there long enough. Most places have their own unique spin on it, some are terrific, some are terrible.
I really liked Brazilian pizza I got in Rio, they use a type of cheese (don't know what it is called) that is absolutely delicious.
Please share your best (and worst!) pizza experiences from around the world.

I think my worst pizza experience was in Scotland. The Scots should stick to what they know, whatever that is.

My absolute best pizza experience was in Brooklyn, though I have also had remarkable pizzas in Buenos Aires as well as in Turkey.

I have also ordered pizzas in Thailand and in Vietnam. The delivery service is fast, but don't go there just for the pizza. You'll be disappointed.

Also: pizza in Colombia? Don't get me started.

The Japanese have won Naples' pizza competition a few years in a row now, and I've had some excellent Japanese pies. But, let's be honest, even if one included Italy, the best (and most diverse) pizzas in the world are found in the good ol' U.S. of A.

Hell, there's some really great pizzerias not far from Denver.

I totally agree about the cheese on the Brazilian pizzas, but I found the sauce and toppings to be sub-par. Japanese? Hmm. I had pizza at 3 different places there and it was really bad. I also think the US has the best and most diverse selection. As far as chains go, Round Table on the west coast is the best by far IMO. California Pizza Kitchen and Wolfgang Pucks are ok too. Can you tell I prefer the thinner crust "wood fired" type pies?

True about the USA, we could probably have a whole topic just discussing different pizzas in the US.
In Missouri where I grew up we have a chain called Imo's Pizza which is thin crust, a white sauce and my favorite pizza ever. In Colorado we have Boujo's "Mountain Pies" which are ultra-thick crust and delicious.
When I was in Japan my resident buddy would not take me to a pizza place. He said Japanese pizza is generally so disgusting I should avoid it and eat all the other delicious Japanese foods (of which there are a lot).

I think the best pizzas I've ever had were in Devonport, Tasmania, Australia. They were nice thin crust ones with fancy-schmance toppings like goat cheese, kalamata olives and sun-dried tomatoes.

I had one as a meal before catching the ferry over to Melbourne and liked it so much that I bought a second to take on the boat with me.

Admittedly, some of my fondness may have stemmed from the fact that they were the first food I ate after 7 days of hiking the Overland Track, but they were some darned good pizzas one way or another.

I'd have to say the best pizza is in Queens with Brooklyn being a close second. Outside of the US, for pure pizza pleasure, I remember having a great pie in Jerusalem. For pizza with a gimmick, Cambodia definitely tops the list...

Wooster Street, New Haven, USA. Sallys is the best pizza I have ever had! Shhh- please don't tell my mother I said that- she loves Pepe's

American pizzas all the way, baby. I like the Chicago deep-dish style with lots of toppings, and the "Greek" pizzas you get in Detroit. Italian pizzas don't even come close. Sorry, ragazzi.

The worst? In Micronesia a "pizza" was dough, tomato paste (no seasonings, just tomato paste), and spam. The fancy places put pineapple on it.

The best part is that there are so many totally different styles of pizza here. Truly something for everyone. I really love pizza and have eaten and enjoyed it from coast to coast. While I prefer a certain style over others, it's mostly all good...except...

<flame suit on>

The hugely popular kind they sell in New York mostly as 'slices'. The kind where they have half-cooked pizzas with little or no toppings sitting under glass. Then when you order, they grab a slice or two, throw on whatever(usually very limited selection) toppings you want and put it back in the oven to finish cooking. Then you sort of fold it in half to eat it. There's probably a simple name for this style, but as I'm not an east-coaster, I don't know it. Anyway, that's the only type of pizza I don't care for..at all. And I have tried several times.

^^

(psssst. braslvr. You're right. It's crap. But you didn't hear it from me.)

It's fine when it initially comes out of the oven, but don't try and sell me reheated pizza.

This kind is literally half-cooked or less as it sits cold under the glass. The cheese is just barely melted and the dough is mostly raw. Also widely available in Jersey.

I don't like half-baked ideas or even the idea of half-baked pizza! Pffft!

I'm sure one of our New York booties will step in with a logical explanation for this soon...

Boston Regina Pizzeria in the North End. no slices
To be fair to Static, The line outside Grimaldi's was much too long, so I can't compare just yet. However a visit to one of Brooklyn's famous pizza places is in the works.

America, the beautiful, where Pizzas are an artform.

I remember Mexican pizzas with some fondness. Neither the sauce, nor the toppings, nor the cheese were anywhere near the American standard, but they were good and cheap. There is something funny, however, about pouring hot sauce on a pizza.

quote:

Originally posted by braslvr:
I'm sure one of our New York booties will step in with a logical explanation for this soon...

Being a New Yorker, I find it embarrassing that our pizza slices are, in general, disgusting. Please don't come to NYC expecting plenty of edible slices (there are few exceptions, fortunately). There are several reasons for NYC pizza being so poor and undercooked:

1) a thin-crust pizza should be a tiny bit black on the edge, or else it's not done. When the crust is thick, however, you cannot even get close to blackening the crust, even a little, because you'll never get the thick, spongy stuff loaded with toppings in the middle to cook even halfway when the crust starts to blacken. Most pizza crusts in NYC slice joints are thick. When you load up already thick crust with chicken parm and ziti and all the stuff that makes USA pizza so diverse, its chances of cooking through are getting slimmer.

2) some customers have a fear that a tiny bit of blackness on the edge of the pie means it's burned. They are wrong. (Hmmm, this might start a holy war...) It's possible that some pizza places give in to this ignorance, especially when all pizza places in the area serve raw-dough slabs.

3) The idea is that the NYC slices are fast food. The logic is to cook it halfway and then finish the cooking when someone orders it. But this makes no sense. Why? The end of the pie gets cooked too much and the middle barely breaks a sweat during reheating. The bacteria that have been breeding on the slice all afternoon are hardly perturbed by this half-witted attempt at cooking the slice. Pizza doesn't do well reheated, and even worse when trying to cook it in two stages.

4) There is too much darn cheese on the pie. Too much cheese means cheese will not brown when the crust starts to blacken. Cheese needs to bubble and get brown spots, otherwise it tastes like earthworms. A thin layer of cheese will brown faster. Browned cheese on pizza in NYC is about as rare as parking spots.

5) The average NYC pizza places are owned by cheapskates. The owner (who is never there; ever notice that?) has the temperature on the ovens turned way down to save his stingy money, so the pizza never cooks properly or completely. He also doesn't want to pay for proper ventilation needed for higher temps either.

6) The said owners don't give a crap about taste. They came to the city to make money money money. They know that lots of customers are either tourists who will never come back, or drunks who can't tell the difference. As long as there are suckers who give the underpaid kid behind the counter $2.50 for a piece of earthworm raw-dough, the New York crappy pizza curse will continue.

Signs of a good pizza place: 1) the owner is there. 2) his/her family is working there. 3) there is a line, whereas the pizza place across the street is empty. 4) they serve toppings that they make in the restaurant, like meatballs. 5) they make dishes other than pizza (pasta, seafood). 7) and the best sign: it smells WONDERFUL in there. Kind of a sweet, bready smell. Not a burned smell.

The last resort is ordering a whole pie from the questionable slice joint. The whole pies are usually cooked more than the by-the-slice stuff.

Well, I guess you got me going on this one.

Thanks for the explanation omnivorous_t. "Slice joints" huh? Well, I guess that's fitting. The only thing I would say is that in my experience, places that serve other things besides pizza, generally, aren't as good at pizza as places that only make pizza. I've been underwhelmed with the pizza in Italian 'ristorantes' more often than not, though always edible.