Matt Yglesias

On the Plurality of Pizza

I decided I needed to beef up on the number of economics-related blogs I read regularly, so I subscribed to Capital Gains and Games (among other blogs) and what did I find but erstwhile budget expert Stan Collender trying to gin up traffic with a post asking for recommendations on where you can get the best pizza in the US. As a blogging gambit, this is a good tactic. But I think that for anyone who seriously wants to maintain that he’s “one of those people who considers pizza to be a basic food group” the only serious answer to this question is to respect the multiple styles of people and a certain degree of incommensurability between them. Some people, to be sure, like the one pictured in this post, are bunk. But beyond that, diversity reigns.

Just thinking about the best pizza in DC, I would tell people that Radius in Mount Pleasant is the closest imitation of a traditional New York pie. It brings me back to my childhood and to John’s Pizzeria down on Bleeker Street. I don’t have much experience with New Haven pizza, but on my couple of trips to that city I really enjoyed their distinctive white clam pizza, and Pete’s Apizza in Columbia Heights offers a decent imitation but the Yalie pie at Comet Pizza is better. I’d say Red Rocks now outshines Two Amy’s in terms of a fancy “gourmet” pie. And obviously to compare any of these to a Chicago pizza or even to an avant-garde California pie would be pointless. There’s no one “best” pizza in the world; rather, there are many pizzas worth trying and different styles for different moods.