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Dear Slice: On the Topsy Turvy Realm of Pizza Rankings

Posted by Adam Kuban, July 15, 2009 at 2:00 PM

Clicking in to the Slice inbox today, a thoughtful email on the futility of ranking pizzerias. —The Mgmt.

I’m a longtime reader and put a lot of stock in your (and Ed Levine’s) opinions, and was just wondering what your thoughts were on the spate of recent high-profile pizza rankings.

Here’s my take (sorry so long): I personally think attempting to rank pizza is almost absurd for a number of reasons. Basically, trying to make finite distinctions between different pizzas is a very subjective and often inaccurate process.

• One, things like mood, hunger level, quality of service, atmosphere, etc., all can greatly affect our opinion of what we’re eating
• Second, the quality of pizza being made may vary greatly day to day and even hour to hour (note Anthony Mangieri’s comments on this in New York magazine's feature this week). How do we know we didn’t visit on a particularly bad/good night or get a pizzeria’s best or worst pie on a given night? I understand consistency is a virtue of a great pizzeria, but a reviewer really needs to visit a given place on a number of occasions at varying times to get a solid understanding of its product
• Third, what are the criteria of the ranking system? They're very rarely laid out in organized detail. How much are the reviewers taking into account service, atmosphere, wine offerings, “authenticity,” etc., (even if done so subconsciously)? For example, how often do we see places decried as “hipster” or “tourist traps” and thus downgraded in people’s eyes? Are we judging the absolute best pie a restaurant makes? Just its plain old Margherita? Do we favor the place that produces multiple really good pies and different styles or the one which only makes one exceptional offering? If so, how did we come to that conclusion? What makes a simply good Neapolitan place better than a great slice place? And is that great slice place only great in relation to its typically bad competition whereas the good Neapolitan pie gets lost in the shuffle of so much great competition? And when a reviewer says a place is disappointing, how much of this is affected by heightened expectations going in?

There are just so many factors that come into play that it seems ranking pizzas, especially different styles, is almost impossible. As an example, New York's list seems to be saying that a Sicilian pie from Veloce Pizzeria is just slightly better than a Neapolitan one from Motorino or La Pizza Fresca, but just slightly worse than one from Zero Otto Nove. How is this distinction even possible? How can we even try, regardless of how good it is, to squeeze a Sicilian pie in between two Neapolitan ones that can each probably be better than the other on any given day and which most people would have a very hard time deciding between in a blind taste test?

One reason I love Slice is its general shying away from rankings. I think the best approach is to just judge each pizza on its own merits. Acknowledge the style of pizza and your preferences, discuss its strengths and weakness, make some comparisons to similar pies, and leave it at that. This need to order everything—especially when combined with many food blogger/reviewers' overly contrarian nature—just produces wildly different rankings and endless bickering, instead of allowing us to enjoy a very strong period of New York pizza.

Best,
Phil

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Dear Phil,

Yeah, I suppose I could have cashed in on clicks/web traffic a long time ago by issuing rankings, etc., but for the reasons you outline, I've always avoided it. First, the minute you do a Top X-number (in Slice's case, it would be Top 8), you get those folks who say, "What, have you tasted every pizza in NYC?" Second, for all the reasons you've mentioned.

Hell, I have a hard time just answering what my favorite pizza is on any given day. My response to that question whenever someone asks is, "What style of pizza? Regular New York slice? Neapolitan? Coal-oven? New York–Neapolitan? Sicilian?" There are so many factors involved, and so much of the comparisons would be apples to oranges, regulars to squares.

The pizza rankings coming out lately, like any food rankings, are what publications do. It's an effective way to drive newsstand sales or generate web traffic, as folks tend to at least peruse the rankings if not comment on them, email links, and discuss them on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I've always found it difficult to rank pizzerias simply because I've learned in my years of Slice-ing that places have ups and downs. And because I'm one guy doing most of the eating for Slice, I simply can't get to all the pizzerias—both well-known and holes-in-the-wall—often enough to know whether a longtime favorite has slipped or if a dark horse has somehow changed something and become top notch.

This however, presents a problem, because many readers have expressed interest in some sort of Slice Best-Of list—and because in my own foodblog-reading experience, I, too, crave top 10 lists. Looking at Slice objectively as if I were a reader coming to it for the first time, I'd totally expect a site that focuses heavily on NYC pizza to have a Top list. But then the editor/writer/gray-area pizza nerd in me resists it.

That said, I have shied away from doing ratings or rankings in individual reviews but have toyed with the notion of having a "Slice Top 8" that would not necessarily be in any kind of order and that would be a rotating highlight of Slice's favorite pizzerias of the moment. Dunno if that's anathema to what you described above and what my own feelings are on Top lists, but I think it might present some sort of middle ground between numerical ranking based on faulty stats and more subjective reviews.

OK, Phil, hope I haven't bored you with that answer.

Hasta la pizza,
Adam

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Tags: best-of lists, Dear Slice, pizza rankings