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Food guide

How to find good pizza

Most disagreements about pizza are actually disagreements about which pizza. A Neapolitan pie judged by New York standards is soggy and too small; a New York slice judged by Neapolitan standards is overcooked and underdressed. Decide which you want first and the question gets much easier.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • The crust edge tells you the oven — Leoparding — irregular dark blisters on the rim — means a very hot oven and a properly fermented dough, and it is the signature of good Neapolitan. An even golden-brown rim means a cooler deck oven, which is what New York style wants. Uniform pale crust with no colour variation usually means a conveyor oven.
  • Dough that was fermented, not just mixed — Long-fermented dough tastes of something on its own and has an open, irregular crumb when you tear the rim. Dough made that morning tastes of flour and is uniformly dense. Places that mention 48- or 72-hour dough are telling you something real.
  • Restraint with the toppings — Overloading is the most common failure, because moisture from too many toppings steams the base. Good pizzerias put three things on a pie, not nine.
  • Sauce that tastes of tomato — Simple, bright, barely cooked. Sweet, thick sauce is covering for tomatoes that were not worth tasting.
  • It should not be greasy underneath — A little oil on top is fine. A slice that leaves a pool when you lift it has too much low-quality cheese and an under-heated base.

What to order

  • Neapolitan — Soft, fast-baked at around 900°F, eaten with a knife and fork, centre deliberately wet. Margherita is the test — nothing to hide behind.
  • New York — Large, thin, foldable, sold by the slice. Judge it by the fold: it should bend without cracking and hold without flopping.
  • Detroit — Rectangular, thick, baked in a steel pan with cheese to the edges so it caramelises into a crust against the wall of the pan. That edge is the entire point.
  • Tavern / Chicago thin — Cracker-thin, cut into squares, a Midwestern tradition largely unknown elsewhere and excellent.
  • Sicilian / grandma — Thick, airy, rectangular, sauce often on top of the cheese. Different from Detroit despite the shape.
  • Deep dish — Chicago's most famous and least representative pizza. Genuinely good, essentially a different dish, and not what locals eat most often.

Where to find pizza

Open listings put 94,306 pizzerias across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 1,172 Chicago, IL 644 Philadelphia, PA 624 Las Vegas, NV 479 Los Angeles, CA 475 Houston, TX 323 Columbus, OH 322 Indianapolis, IN 305 Pittsburgh, PA 300 Austin, TX 292 San Antonio, TX 277 Dallas, TX 277

Campuses with the most within a mile

NYU 273 CUNY Graduate Center 257 Touro University 251 The New School 249 FIT 238 Baruch 237 BMCC 122 Pace University 117 John Jay 111 Hunter 111

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

Pizza near campus

How Savor Scout looks for it

Searching for pizza, the matcher looks for the vocabulary that separates these styles — wood-fired, coal oven, 00 flour, long-fermented, Detroit-style, by the slice — and weighs reviews mentioning crust texture far more heavily than overall rating. If you name a style in your search, it prioritises places whose menus and reviews actually use that style's language rather than places that merely sell pizza.

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Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

When you might want this

Where to eat with a toddler What to eat on moving day Where to eat with a big group Where to eat with picky eaters