Why I Don’t Rate Pizza Pie

The pizza expert shows up at the joint wearing a Boston Bruins cap turned backward, camera crew in tow. He's got numbers in his head before that all-important first bite, decimal points waiting to drop like toppings on a loaded supreme. That's the content game for you now.

Everything needs a score, even the things that can't be scored.

I knew a fighter once who rated his opponents by how many teeth they'd lost. The gambling men my father grew up with ranked horses by lucky numbers and dream sequences. Now we've got people treating pizza like it's Olympic figure skating, deducting points for cheese distribution and crust elasticity.

My buddy Ben labors over the preparation of fancy pizza. He's got thermometers and special flour from Italy, weighs his water like a pharmacist filling prescriptions. The dough rises in containers marked with times and temperatures. He talks about hydration percentages the way old-time boxing trainers used to discuss reach advantages.

But Ben's not above grabbing a five-dollar hot-and-ready when the mood strikes. That's what separates the true believers from the pretenders. The pretenders won't touch anything that costs less than their watch or falls below a certain Portnoy score. The true believers know pizza is democracy in edible form.

Back in the Ohio Valley, they lay cold cheese on hot sauce, let it melt halfway to heaven. New Haven burns their pies black as a fighter's eye after a bad round. St. Louis uses processed cheese that wouldn't pass muster in Wisconsin or Vermont. Detroit builds walls of crust like they're fortifying against an invasion by the Huns. They're all right and they're all wrong, depending on who's doing the eating and when the eating gets done.

The scoring system guys—all those wannabe Portnoys, doing it for free or (worse still) paying for the privilege—remind me of the high-rolling gamblers who used to hang around the Meadows racetrack with my dad, telling everyone they had a mathematical formula for picking winners. They'd wave around sheets of paper covered in numbers, talking about track conditions and bloodlines. Meanwhile, the regular players who knew the game would bet on a horse because they liked the look in its eye.

Pizza's not meant for decimal points. It's meant for midnight when the bars close, or Sunday afternoon when the game's on, or Tuesday night when nobody wants to cook. It's meant for kids' birthday parties and office celebrations where nobody remembered to order until the last minute. It works because it works, not because someone calculated the optimal ratio of sauce to cheese.

The pizza critic industry sprouted up like mushrooms after rain. Suddenly everyone's got an angle, a platform, a following. They travel city to city like old-time wrestling promoters, stirring up controversy, building their brand. The same pie that gets an 8.4 in Chicago scores a 6.7 in Brooklyn. The numbers don't mean anything except to the people keeping score.

I've eaten pizza in all but five states and a dozen countries. Had it served by old hairy guys who learned to make it in Naples and young distracted girls who learned to make it yesterday. Had it in places where they treat the recipe like a sacred text and places where they treat it like a science experiment. Had it in joints where they won't make it unless the moon is in the right phase and joints where they won't make it unless you order at least 10 toppings.

The best pizza I ever had was in a town whose name I can't remember, made by a guy whose name I never knew. It was good because I was hungry and it was there. That's the whole story. No numbers required.

The five-dollar joints keep the lights on while the artisanal places come and go like fighters chasing championship dreams. They serve the same people who used to bet two dollars to show, who used to sit in the cheap seats at the minor league baseball game. The people who know that sometimes good enough is exactly good enough.

Ben understands this. He'll spend three days crafting the perfect pie in his cathedral of crust, then turn around and eat a slice from the gas station because he's hungry. That's the mark of a true believer. The pretenders are still out there with their scorecards and decimal points, missing the point entirely.

Pizza isn't a competition. It's not a science. It's not a religion. It's just dinner, or lunch, or breakfast if you're living right. The numbers guys can keep their systems. The rest of us will keep eating whatever's hot and ready, whenever we're ready for it.