Once upon a time — the 1990s, it might’ve been -- you could amble clear across America without discovering a local craft beer. Small towns didn't have their own coffee roasters that served rare Fair Trade brews to landscapers and electricians and cops on the way to work. Even in bigger cities, farm-to-table was regarded as some sort of hippie California trend. You could roll into most places, in most states, and not taste anything new, anything really distinct. And most people seemed to tolerate that with a shrug.
But there’s one exception to the meek acceptance of interchangeable food -- then, now, and always. Americans will straight-up fight your ass over who has the best pizza.
"Best" to you could mean cheapest, fastest, or bulkiest. It could mean flat-out most delicious. Or it could mean the slice that you would most trust to put your town on the map. The pie you roll out when your out-of-town friends come to visit. That's our criteria here, in 35 American metropolises where pizza is a battlefield: the slice you'd feed to a weary, skeptical traveler, in the most memorable pizzeria your city can offer. Bring 'em on.
Cincinnati
Catch-a-Fire Pizza
Oakley
Pizzas you’ve never seen before, served in a brewery
This wildly popular Queen City food truck opted recently to set up permanent shop in the most sensible place for a pizzeria: the middle of a brewery. Now the official café at MadTree Brewing, it’s bringing the most creative wood-fired pizzas Cincinnati has ever seen. Try the Hangover Pie with sausage gravy, sausage, and a cracked egg. Or the Berries & Cream, probably the first dinner pizza you’ll ever see with strawberries as a legitimate topping. But for a real taste of the city’s German heritage, try the Goettup, Stand Up, which in addition to garlic and a cracked egg has goetta on top.