Ok, who in your opinion has the best pizza???

 I for one have just switched from Domino's to Marco's who are 1. cheaper, 
and 2, quite tastier. The toppings are fresh and plentiful and the crust is
well baked and crisp. Overall a good pizza.I seemed to be the most impressed
by the price and the way it is cut. Domino's tends to have non-standard slices
but Marcos cuts thiers into 8 or 12 (depending on size) slices that are 
actually equal.

enter your own huzzahs for the pizza you call for here.

109 responses total.

 Cottage Inn's Deep Dish Spicy Med, minus the hot peppers, plus mushrooms &
onions.

  My baby liked it so much, he stole a whole full-tray from me once!

At my house we've switch to Anthony's Gourmet, and won't switch again.

anthony's is good, but the service is anywhere from sullen to churlish.

marco's is good, too. hungry howie's makes pretty good pizza and offers
amazing deals.

gepetto's used to be fabulous, but they've changed this year. now they're
more on the level of "pizza bob's"...you decide if there's a pun there.

cottage inn is also very good, though sometimes it has too much crust
and too little sauce.

i don't like little caesar's or domino's, typically.

I haven't had pizza anywhere in Ann Arbor to match that available
in New York.  Any suggestions from you New Yorkers out there?

Yes.  My suggestion is if you want pizzas like you get in NY, you have to make
a trip back.  Otherwise, you alter your frame of reference here and start
with Uno's or Anthony's deep dish.  We just changed from Cottage Inn to
Marco's also.  Cottage Inn used to be terrific.  Recently seems to have
been modeling after Dominos and deteriorating in taste and quality.  I wonder
if all the cottage inn  outlets have been going down hill.

How depressing.

not the one on Washtenaw in Ypsi...
I went to the one downtown, and was thoroughly depressed by
the service and quality in comparison...

I have heard that Pizza House on Church is a good pizza...

  what doth you say?

  I say nay..  They're pricey and their pizza is uninspiring.  The fact
that they offer a decent whole wheat crust is about their only saving 
grace.

  These days if I want something that tastes good (as opposed to cheap)
I'll order from Anthony's.  Their quality varies substantially according
to how long it takes to get from the oven to your door..  Unlike Keats,
I haven't found their service to be sullen.  It's a bit slow, perhaps,
but the only times I've had trouble (wrong items on the pizza) they haven't
made any fuss about sending another one out.

  I used to order from Cottage Inn but these days I find little to like
about their pizza.  The pizzas that get delivered to our house (from the
Cottage Inn on Packard & Hill) seem to consist of fluffy crust, barely
any sauce, and a very measly portion of cheese.

  Papa Romano's pizzas are fairly good (with the added bonus that they
offer turkey as an item (a couple of other places around town do, too,
but most do not..)  They also win the "Cheapest Pizza" award if you
happen to get one or two of those "Michigan Money Saver" coupon books
at the beginning of the term (the books have a "buy one little bambino,
get one free" coupon which will get you a lot of food for $3.00)  A major
minus, alas, is the fact that they charge $1.50 for delivery..

I was raised on East Coast pizza, and alas, there is nothing in
the midwest that is really the same...  My favorite pizza in
New York is V&T's on Amsterdam Avenue, near the Cathedral of
St. John the Divine.  I don't really have a favorite in 
Ann Arbor.  Sometimes we get Cottage Inn (but their sauce is
spicier than I like), sometimes Omega Pizza, sometimes we
even go to Pizza Hut, though I was grossed out by their 
toppings last time we did that.  Lately we've been enjoying
going to Uno's.  Nothing at all like the pizza I remember, but
quite nice in its own right.

Wow!  I'm getting hungry for the pizza I love...  I wonder how
long it would take me to drive to New Jersey and order from
the place that sustained me while I was a student at Rutgers...

How does "East Coast pizza" differ from "Midwest pizza"?

Pizza House is terrible. Their pizza is edible, but their service
is pure nastiness.

I got serviced very nicely by one of their former employees, but she could be 
a real bitch at times.

"got serviced"?

I just wish that the Uno's in Ann Arbor (and elsewhere) would serve pizza
comparable to Pizzaria Uno/Pizzaria Due in Chicago (which itself is not
particularly outstanding Chicago-style deep dish, but is adequate..)

I think of Uno's pizza as a separate food, quite tasty in its
own right.  I did have real deep dish pizza in Chicago about a
year and a half ago, and I'll agree that it doesn't resemble
the local Uno's in any way.

East coast pizza has a very thin, crispy crust (I'm speaking of
New York and New Jersey pizza here), a sauce that's somewhat 
salty, and not too much of it, and tons of cheese.  Also lots
of oregano.  I find midwest pizza has usually got a too thick
crust (I'm not talking deep dish or pan pizza here), and rarely
has enough cheese for my taste.  ^P+^P0It's a very personal
thing, I guess...  But I'm not alone among transplanted easterners
in missing our native pizza.

<sigh>...it's true. there are some good pizzas out here, but most
are chain-delivery sorts.  the pizza on which i grew up, including
at college, was inevitably homemade pie from a family-owned rest-
aurant. crusts are thin but fresh, the sauce is generous and re-
freshing, and the cheeze is _never_ burned (as happens several
places out here) as if the pie were baked in a toaster oven.

i really miss authentic pizza sometimes.

 (I *like* my cheese slightly toasted..  (emphasis on *slightly*))

well, you can get that in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed, or another
$3 off to put in the toasteroven fund to toast yer own pizzas.

  Dream on..

No offense, Dan, but if that pizza is the same one I had in Hamilton,
you're just being nostalgic. It wasn't _that_ great.

Here's another vote for NYC pizza.

Hey, howzabout a 600 plus mile road trip, just to get some pizza?

   Yes!

   I'm serious.  That would make a wonderful weekend trip.

They have AWE-INSPIRING knishes, too.

Is there any way that New York style pizza would translate to a recipe
we could make at home...or is it one of those things you have to experience
before you can feel competent at reproducing the recipe at home?

i *still* can't figure out what makes NYC pizza different from anybody
else's pizza.  any pizza i've ever made at home has come out more like
a midwestern pizza.  :(
what makes NYC pizza specially *might* be garlic-related.
dunno.

Well, I've been thinking about buying a pizza stone and one of
those wooden paddle things to start experimenting with making
better pizza at home...  I have a couple of different crust and
sauce recipes to start from.

  sure... lets see... 1.00 flag drop plus 1.10 per mile.... hmmm I guess that
I could drive ya'll for a fair price... ;-)

I've got a pizza stone and one of those wooden paddle things.  They
work quite nicellike that system much better than putting it
all on a metal pan.  Anyone have any good cleanup tips for pizza
stones that they'd like to share?  (Cleaning them can be a real pain).

re :25, it has more to do with the fact that New Yorkers are convinced
that New York is heaven and the Midwest is where you go when you
die if you are bad. Their pizza could taste like British pizza and
they'd swear up and down it's better than anything that comes out
of <disgusted sniff> the Midwest.

That's not true about this ex-New Yorker mythago.  I can bash NYC with the
best of them when its deserved and I much prefer living in Ann Arbor then
New York now, but I call a spade a spade and when it comes to food, NY has
the midwest beat by more that 600 miles.  Especially when it comes to Pizza.
Oh yes, and all Italian food.  And I haven't had good Sauerbraten since
I've moved here.  The thing is, there are so many small mom and pop places
where the ingredients are fresh and delicious, and we just dont have them here.
Of course, I feel alot safer when I go out to eat, but then I dont always
enjoy the food as much.  Sigh.  Life is a series of giving and taking.

Sauerbraten is Italian?

  Yeah.  Youse got a problem wit dat?

re 30: ditto to what audrey said: i'll hapily bash NYC on most counts (it
was a nice place to grow up, but i wouldn't want to live there now), but
the pizza there is *wonderful*!

Laurel - have you ever eaten pizza in NYC?  If not, check it out some time!

Nope, just bagels and knishes. 

I agree w/valerie and audrey...  New York has become a way dangerous
place to hang out (at least, it seemed that way last time I was there,
way back in 1991), but there is just so much really great food
there...  I didn't grow up in NYC, but I lived in Princeton, NJ until
I was 18, and I got my BA at Rutgers (in New Brunswick, NJ), so I
was never more than an hour from New York for the first 23 years of
my life.  I have many wonderful memories of restaurants and 
take-out food from there.

Anyone have any good pizza recipes (crust, sauce, toppings, etc.) they'd
like to share?

The best deep-dish I've found in A^2 is Anthony's.  Gepettos has good combos
available--I strongly reccomend feta & hot pepper.

My favorite recipe for pizza is the pizza bagel/pizza pita.

I prefer the Cottage Inn's "Best of Cottage Inn"

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