101 Best Pizzas in America – According to thedailymeal.com

Without a doubt, most of America’s best pies are still in New Haven, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Phoenix. Sorry, San Diego

– Louisville was the only other city in the midwest, besides Chicago, to even make the list. Garage Bar got #60.

Pizza! If you grew up obsessed with it — postgame pizza, movie-night pizza, baby-sitting pizza, college dorm pizza, New York-, New Haven-, Neapolitan-, deep-dish-, St. Louis-, Detroit-style pizza, pizza! — and pursued that American passion for cheese, sauce, and bread with an adult fascination for seeking the best slice, the finest pie, the Platonic Neapolitan, then the idea of naming America’s best is likely contentious. Who serves America’s best pizza? “My favorite spot, of course!” Americans will declare. Yes, pizza is tough to rank responsibly. But once again, that’s just what The Daily Meal set out to do.

View List: 101 Best Pizzas in America (Slideshow)

Pizza is about as varied and beloved a genre, as opinionated a subject, and also as accessible a food as there is. Even one pie at the country’s most expensive, remote, and esteemed pizza temples is within reach of the average person’s budget. And every red-blooded American, rich and poor, grew up with their regional style of this national fascination, knowing it as the best. Talk about setting up an argument! “A best pizza list? I know pizza,” both sides will claim. “That’s not great pizza!” Which pizzerias truly serve pies to seek out, return for, and be in awe of? It’s more difficult than ever to answer that question.

One of the problems with even the most well-intentioned best pizza lists is their length, or lack of length actually. Lists mentioning 10, 15, 25, and even The Daily Meal’s own collection of 35 places last year just don’t do the topic justice. There are too many great places that deserve consideratioand mention. Out of necessity (and sanity), writers have and often do  exclude long lists of suggestions from locals, friends, and other experts. Some pick geographic representatives and select what they think are the best of each. And others have taken to declaring a list of the country’s best pizza to be impossible, noting as food writer Steven Coomes did recently, that the quality of pizza is “tied to particular ingredients chosen that day and put into the hands of a particular pizza maker.” “To borrow a word from the wine industry,” Coomes explained, “It’s about the terroir.”

Read article in its entirety and see list here.