Thick base, thin base, pineapple on it or not – there is so much disagreement about what makes a good pizza that it has caused friendships to break up and marriages to fail. The only thing that cannot be disputed is that the pizza is quintessentially Italian. Naples is said to be the cradle of pizza. But does that mean that the best pizzas are there? The “Holidu” portal has dared to do the almost impossible and take a look at whether Italy is really still the Mecca for pizza lovers or whether other nations are now overtaking the Italians. The result is a ranking of the ten supposedly most attractive cities for pizza enthusiasts.
Who is actually allowed to rate pizza and according to what criteria? “Holidu” didn’t take a cue from the Michelin Guide and send incognito testers out into the world, but simply evaluated data. The study is based on reviews on Google Maps. The study examined how many restaurants in European cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants were rated more than 4.5 stars. The resulting ranking shows which cities have the highest number of top-rated pizza restaurants in relation to their residents. Since the data has limited significance, the ranking should be read with a wink.
1st place: Turin, Italy
Italy tops the ranking of the best pizza cities. However, it is not the mother city of pizza, Naples, that takes first place, but Turin in the north of Italy. The city is known, among other things, for the invention of the fluffy pan pizza “Pizza al tegamino” and the “Pizza al padellino”, a crispy, thin version.
2nd place: Nuremberg, Germany
Nuremberg, of all places, the city that actually made a name for itself with grilled sausages, is also Germany’s showcase city for delicious pizza. In Bavaria’s second largest city there is not only a wide range of pizzerias. The guests liked what came out of the oven so much that their ratings put the city in second place. The flagship: the “Pizza Flammkuchen”.
3rd place: Rome, Italy
Third place goes to Rome, the capital of Italy. There, too, pizza baking has a centuries-old tradition; various variations such as the “Pizza Romana” are baked. This is thin and crispy, but comes with a high edge. Equally popular is the “pizza al taglio”, which is rectangular and sold by weight.
4th place: Lyon, France
Lovers of classic pizza will have to keep an eye out here. Because in Lyon, France, pizza tradition meets French cuisine. The pizza primarily uses local products. This can be seen, for example, in the “Pizza Savoyarde”, which is topped with cheese, ham and – yes – potatoes.
5th place: Dortmund, Germany
A slap in the face to traditionalists is what makes Dortmund pizzas so popular. Because the toppings in the multi-cultural city have little to do with Italian pizzas. Here we mix things that at first glance cannot be mixed, for example in the “Pizza Mett”. You read that right, this is a pizza that is served with raw minced pork.
6th place also goes to the Ruhr area, more precisely: Essen. Marseille takes 7th place. Perhaps the biggest surprise: Naples is still in the top 10, but falls behind in 8th place. Completing the top 10 are Krakow, 9th place, and Lisbon, 10th place.
This ranking is certainly not to everyone’s taste due to the data used. A bad amateur review on Google doesn’t necessarily mean that the pizza tasted bad. The guest can also be dissatisfied if the waiter was unfriendly or the table was placed too close to the toilets. It happens that shops with very good food are rated poorly because it is primarily the dissatisfied guests who rate them, but not the satisfied ones. A colleague from “Vice” has already revealed how unreliable such rankings can be. He had advertised his shed as a hip new restaurant on Tripadvisor with fake reviews until “The Shed at Dulwich” was actually the best-rated restaurant in London on the platform – even though the restaurant never really existed.
The makers behind “50 Top Pizza,” who also published a ranking last October, chose a different approach for a comparison. This is considered by experts to be a kind of “Michelin Guide for Pizza”. The ranking was traditionally created on the basis of restaurant visits by anonymous test eaters from expert circles. The ranking includes the best pizzerias and not the best cities for pizza. According to the professionals from “50 Top Pizza”, the best pizza comes from Campania. The pizzeria “10 Diego Vitagliano” from Naples shares first place with last year’s winner “I Masanielli – Francesco Martucci” from neighboring Caserto. Both offer classic Neapolitan pizza – thin crust, thick crust. Second place goes to “Una Pizza Napoletana” in New York, third place goes to “Sartoria Panatieri” in Barcelona.
