Just wait until you’ve heard about the war crime that is Ohio Valley-style pizza
You guys are going to have your minds blown if you ever go to Italy
Lol, I love all pizza, even shit pizza. Nothing like a 3am grease slab from the kebabbery which would make an Italian spit at you!
Italian pizza is basically an entirely different dish at this point. It happens. American pizza isn’t somehow less valid for having drastically changed from the original thing. It was, after all, brought here by Italian immigrants.
The wild thing is, what’s often thought of as Italian pizza isn’t even really older than American pizza.
It’s generally regarded as being created around 1890, and the first American pizza parlor opened in 1905.
It’s almost like recipes evolve, and a dish created before tomatoes were brought to Europe might have different variants.
I’ve been to Italy. Still really love Detroit style pizza. When I was in Italy (late '90s), none of us realized that pepperoni was an English name that didn’t exist in Italy. We got a pizza with a bunch of kinds of peppers on it at this place in Rome. Was still great, though.
Maybe I’ve been to the wrong Italy, but tried pizza in Milan and on Rome and both were very underwhelming.
I imagine like everywhere there are good places and shit places to buy food
You should specifically look for places with Neapolitan pizza, it’s by far the best
I mean you had pizza at one place in those cities. You haven’t tried them all.
Not one place, I remember this one place specifically.
But yes, I’m aware my sample size is small. So what. As a tourist you have a subjective view of what you experience in a country, unless you’re one of the people glued to Google Maps reviews and waiting in lines to Michelin restaurants.
We’re you eating at the airport McDonald’s? Italians do not mess around with food and will fuck places up if they’re serving shit. As a friend of mine said (who lived there for 8 years) you get better sandwiches at Italian truckstops than you do at specialty delis in North America.
Nah I can speak from experience that both the best and worst pizza I’ve ever had were had within the very same visit to Rome. Probably within 24 hours of each other.
Once in an almost touristy area - not the spots with the most traffic, mind you, but where you transferred from suburban rail to bus to get to those spots, so still in the city. Hot garbage. The worst pizza I’ve had in my life. It was soggy, thin, and mass-produced, who knows how long it had been sitting out, served in an atmosphere I can only describe as mall cafeteria but smaller and contained in one storefront.
Best pizza was this little take-out spot in a beach district called Ostia, on the other end of that same rail line, which I stumbled upon by chance because I forgot to bring a swimsuit for the beach and it was across from the calzedonia I happened to stop at. I took it to eat with my friend who was sitting outside a nearby cafe. It was hot, crispy, with fresh tomato sauce and soft bread. I probably won’t find anything that measures up to it for a while tbh.
The closest since then is maybe a small local place down the road from me here in Michigan, but I’m also someone that can appreciate american pizza for what it is. It’s not trying to be italian and that’s okay lol.
I had other pizza in Rome too but honestly most of the food I had there, save that one slice from the mom and pop shop in Ostia, really wasn’t anything to write home about.
I remember the one in Rome, it was somewhere in a residential area, not Colloseum etc, and there was a small line of people waiting. Very likely it was a bad place or some strange style of pizza that did not hit my plebean tastebuds. Or anyone else’s in our little group.