Phillys Pizza´s

The pizza in Philly sucks.

You have heard someone say this. And there's a good chance that someone was you.

After all, a loathsome view of our native pizza-craft is Philadelphia parlance in its purest form. To malign this city's reputation for heat-blistered dough — a place that has always been, and will always be, a sandwich town, down to its provolone-shrouded DNA — is to embrace Philly's tortuous, punch-drunk hate affair with its own geographic inferiority.

People blame the water. People blame New York City, lamenting that the greatest Italian pizza-makers didn't stray far enough south after deboarding butt-to-gut passenger ships on Ellis Island. Some even blame La Cosa Nostra — the grinning old South Philly wives' tale goes that the local mafia chapter, in its heyday, had such an unshakable chokehold on deliveries of flour, mozzarella and tomato sauce that every pizzeria in town ended up with the same mediocre products, sending a chilling effect down the spines of generations of kids hoping for a solid slice and a cold Coke on a sticky Saturday afternoon.


Restaurateur Stephen Starr, in the months leading up to the fall 2009 opening of his Pizzeria Stella in Headhouse Square, caused a minor uproar when he told KYW Newsradio that he decided to pursue the project because he "can't get really good pizza here in Philadelphia." A subsequent thread on local dining site Foobooz earned dozens of pointed reactions; close to half of them agreed with Starr's sentiment. (In Dec. 2009, Starr clarified his position, telling City Paper that Port Richmond's Tacconelli's was "the only pizza in Philadelphia I thought was good.")

Point being, whether you're the head of a multi-million-dollar hospitality conglomerate or an irascible food blog reader, it's easy to malign a food as universally familiar as pizza — and it's even easier to idle while those plaintive murmurs enter the epicurean echo chamber, ensuring that those uninterested in forming their own opinions embrace generalization as gooey-cheesed gospel.

In my summation, though, the state of Philadelphia pizza is stronger than ever. This city's stable of respected pizzerias has been bolstered by an influx of passionate, obsessive dough stretchers, so-called "artisans" who raise the construction of the common slice from expressionless task to tempestuous art form. But Philadelphia pizza is about so much more than just them.
that actually is. Do we have a singular pizza identity, a standout approach that anyone can spot and immediately brand as a product of the 215? There's the cheeseless, focaccia-like tomato pie squares stocked at Italian corner bakeries throughout the region, as well as the sauce-on-top, cheese-on-bottom thin-crust rounds (also called tomato pie, confusingly) served along Frankford Avenue in Northeast Philly, but both are too comfortable in their respective niches to speak for an entire city. After talking to multiple pizza authorities, chefs and pizza-makers, I've reached a dual conclusion on this issue. The polite answer is no, there is no widespread style visible above all others in Philadelphia. The impolite answer? Yes, there is one — but it's no good.

When Inquirer restaurant critic Craig LaBan arrived here 12 years ago, he most commonly uncovered "big, Greek pizzeria pies, a sweet kind of profile, a lot of cheese," stuff cranked out by the budget parlors that also specialize in chicken fingers and cheese fries. "Usually really low-grade ingredients … nothing distinctive at all. Nothing that [would stand] out in a national search for pizza."

"If there's a signature pizza, I don't like it," says Frank Maimone, entering his 10th year running Rustica Pizza in Northern Liberties, "because it looks anemic and white and not cooked."
Marlo Dilks, who with her husband, Jason, owns the SliCE parlors at 10th and Federal and 18th and Sansom, grew up at 20th and Ritner and remembers her father refusing to eat South Philly-sourced pies her mother brought home on Friday evenings, when the traditional Italian-Catholic family refrained from eating meat. At your run-of-the-mill Philly pizza place, Dilks feels, "you don't get very Italian pizza — you get very Americanized, fast-food pizza. "

"Go anywhere in the country to a pizza joint [and] most places have signs boasting that they're this style pizza, or that city's kind of pie," says Brian Dwyer, a Kensington-based artist so fanatical about pizza that he actually curated a lighthearted exhibit on the topic at Rocket Cat Café this May. "You don't get a lot of that around here. You just have … well, pizza."

And so it goes: What constitutes Philadelphia pizza cannot be summed up in a tidy, Wiki-friendly sound bite. The onus, then, falls into the flour-dusted hands of this city's individual pizza-makers, whose disciplines, influences and inspirations vary as wildly as their beliefs of what it takes to turn an everyman snack into an elemental experience.


Pizza-makers — or "pizzaioli," the Italian term that's found footing in authenticity-fixated circles — don't agree on much, if anything. They can be opinionated, disorienting and downright temperamental. But the one thing they pore over in equal stead is the details. Pizza, perhaps the most straightforward-on-paper food this side of peanut butter and jelly, is infinitely complicated in its execution; a microscopic recipe augmentation can translate into a huge difference in final product. A passing query can expand into an hourlong discussion about Italian flour, oven placement, "leoparding" (a term for the char marks on the underside of a pie) or wood versus coal versus gas faster than you can say "extra cheese."

Marc Vetri, who provides much-buzzed-about pies at his three-year-old Osteria, is intimately familiar with the challenge. "There's more humidity in the air," he says. "Less humidity in the air. Water temperature. Add a little water sometimes. Add a little sugar. A little brandy. All these little nuances. Should we cook it at a higher heat right now? Store [the dough] at room temperature right now? Store it in the cold? Millions of little different things."