The Slice IndexThe Slice Indexby Joey Pepperoni
About / Methodology

Methodology

Why The Slice Index?

Most “best pizza” lists have a basic problem: the pizzas are not being compared by the same person.

That is especially true of major publications. National lists have an even harder job. It is difficult for any publication to have one person eat enough pizza, across enough places and over enough time, to make all of those comparisons directly. There is nothing wrong with that. Publications are trying to do something different.

The Slice Index has a structural advantage: I have personally eaten and rated every pizzeria on this site. The person deciding whether a pizza in Cincinnati deserves a 9.2 is the same person who gave a pizza in New York a 9.2. I use the same scale across cities, styles, famous pizzerias, neighborhood institutions, bakeries, pop-ups, new-wave slice shops, places in suburban strip malls, and places represented by giant anthropomorphic rats.

The comparisons also get better as the sample gets deeper. If you have tried ten pizzerias in a city, “best pizza” really means the best of the ten you happened to try. If you have tried 50 or 100, you can start making much more meaningful distinctions.

That is why I am particularly proud of my Best Pizza in Cincinnati and Best Pizza in New York City guides. In both places, I have eaten widely enough that I think the rankings are genuinely useful rather than just lists of places I happened to visit. My Best Pizza in Chicago ranking is pretty strong as well, although I don’t spend as much time there any more as I would like. The broader world ranking is a lifelong project, and I am not yet prepared to claim that I have personally resolved the question of the world’s best pizza.

I still miss places, and every ranking is provisional. But the point of The Slice Index is to build those comparisons over time rather than start from scratch every time someone needs a list.

It is not crowdsourced, not an algorithm, not clickbait, and not an aggregation of what other people think. There are no paid rankings. Reputation matters very little. A famous pizzeria can make a disappointing pizza. A place nobody outside the neighborhood has heard of, except for the most careful observers, can make an extraordinary one.

The pizza gets the score.

Two Ways to Appreciate Pizza

There are many ways to appreciate pizza.

One is to seek out the places everyone is talking about: the newest openings, the longest lines, the pizzas that dominate social media. There is nothing wrong with that. Some of the world’s best pizzas are also its most celebrated.

Another way asks different, quieter questions.

Is the dough well made? Does the bake suit the style? Is the pizza balanced? Does it respect the tradition it belongs to, or improve upon it? Is there craftsmanship here that rewards a careful observer?

The Slice Index is built around that second approach.

I am interested in things that often receive less attention: the oven, the fermentation, the undercarriage, the restraint, the history, and the countless small decisions that separate good pizza from great pizza.

In short, the craft.

The audience for looking at pizza this way will probably always be smaller. That’s okay. I’m not trying to tell you where everyone else is eating. I’m trying to help you, and myself, notice what makes a pizza exceptional.

How a Score Is Made

There is no formula that turns a pizza into an 8.7.

I do not assign three points for crust, two for sauce, subtract 0.2 for excessive oregano, and feed the result into a spreadsheet. Pizza is too complicated for that to work well. Pretending otherwise would create precision without much accuracy.

The score is my overall judgment of the pizza I actually ate.

I try to judge each pizza according to what it is trying to be. A tavern-style pizza should not lose points because it lacks the airy rim of a Neapolitan pizza. A Detroit square is not worse because it is heavier than a New York slice. A New Haven pizza is not failing because it does not fold correctly. Different styles are trying to accomplish different things.

But the numerical scale is shared. A 9.2 tavern pizza and a 9.2 Neapolitan pizza should represent roughly the same level of accomplishment within their respective forms.

When I return to a pizzeria, a later visit can change my judgment. Pizza changes. Restaurants improve. Restaurants decline. They change dough recipes, ovens, cooks, ingredients, locations and ownership. Sometimes they simply have a very good or very bad night.

If a later visit materially changes what I think, I may change the score. When I have multiple full reviews, the earlier ones remain on the site so you can see how the pizza, and my assessment of it, changed.

Conditions matter too. A pizza eaten thirty seconds after it leaves an oven is not the same pizza after twenty minutes steaming inside a cardboard box. I try to account for that rather than pretending every pizza was evaluated under laboratory conditions.

What Matters Most

What matters most is whether it actually tastes good.

There are a million ways to make great pizza, but I tend to pay particular attention to a few things.

The crust comes first.

The biggest part of a pizza is bread.

If the crust does not taste good on its own, it places a ceiling on how great the pizza can be. I look for fermentation, flavor, texture, structure, and whether I actually want to keep eating the crust after the toppings are gone.

This is also why bakeries have an unfair habit of making excellent pizza.

Then the bake.

A great bake does not simply mean “more char.”

The right bake depends on the pizza. What I want from a cracker-thin tavern pie is very different from what I want from a Neapolitan pizza, a Detroit square, or a New York slice.

The question is whether the oven produced the right combination of browning, crispness, tenderness, char, moisture and structure for that particular pizza.

Then balance.

Sauce, cheese, toppings, salt, fat, acidity and texture should make sense together.

The toppings, cheese and sauce should taste good individually and better together. Nothing should have to rescue something else.

More is not automatically better. Three times as much cheese can successfully disguise quite a few problems, particularly if you also provide me with enough dipping sauce.

That is different from making great pizza.

And then judgment.

The best pizzas tend to feel deliberate.

Someone has thought seriously about the dough, the oven, the ingredients, what belongs on the pizza and, just as importantly, what does not.

Restraint is often a sign of confidence.

Great pizza is more complicated than an algorithm.

How I Compare Different Styles

Any style of pizza done well can be top tier. I ask whether the pizza succeeds at what it is trying to do.

Traditions matter, but they are not museum rules. Some of my favorite pizzerias take an established form and make it better through longer fermentation, better ingredients, a more precise bake, or simply better judgment.

My least favorite style is careless pizza: bland dough, an indifferent bake, and shortcuts disguised with extra cheese.

But I’m not going to be too judgmental here. If you cover a flawed pizza with three times as much cheese, it can still be enjoyable. Especially with extra dipping sauce and a second side of garlic knots.

It just rarely makes for a memorable pizza experience.

Repeatability

One spectacular bite isn’t enough.

Some pizzas are immediately impressive but become heavy, monotonous or badly out of balance halfway through. Others become more enjoyable with every slice. I generally favor the latter.

The best pizzas are the ones I want to keep eating.

This is one reason balance matters so much. Pizza is not normally consumed one carefully plated bite at a time. A great pizza should survive contact with an actual appetite.

What the Score Means

The scoring bands are intentionally simple.

The tenths are useful because rankings require distinctions. They should not be mistaken for measurements of physical constants.

If I give one pizza an 8.8 and another an 8.7, I preferred the 8.8. But pizza varies from visit to visit, and I am not claiming that the difference could be reproduced to the tenth under every possible set of conditions.

The scores are judgments. The purpose of the scale is consistency, not fake scientific precision.

Editorial Independence

The rules here are straightforward.

If a pizza is provided free of charge, I disclose it.

A restaurant does not receive a higher score because it reposted something I wrote, invited me to an event, knows who I am, or has an especially persuasive publicist.

It’s an ethical thing, but also I would be cheating myself. This whole project becomes considerably less interesting if the rankings can be bought.

Closed Pizzerias

Pizzerias are always rising and falling in America.

Closed pizzerias remain in the archive. Restaurants disappear surprisingly quickly, and old pizza places are part of a city’s history. I would rather preserve those reviews than pretend the places never existed.

Cincinnati is where I have the deepest historical record, so I have also been building a separate Lost Pizzerias of Cincinnati archive to preserve restaurants that have disappeared from the local pizza landscape.

Closed pizzerias are clearly identified, placed below open restaurants in current rankings, and excluded from the map.

Their reviews and scores remain so The Slice Index can also be a record of pizza history.

Limits

I once took my children to the beach to watch me command the waves to stop.
They, of course, did not.
Thus teaching an important lesson about the limits of my powers.
Limits are real.

Pizza varies from day to day, even at excellent pizzerias. Dough fermentation, oven temperature, staffing, timing, travel, and whatever happened inside the oven during those particular sixty seconds all matter.

I have eaten pizzas that I thought were just okay, returned later, and found them to be great. Even fifteen minutes in a pizza box can make a noticeable difference.

I also have not tried every pizza. My Best Pizza in Italy list, for example, remains embarrassingly incomplete.

And pizzerias change over time as recipes, cooks, ovens, locations and ownership change.

A truly scientific ranking would require eating every pizzeria in the world on the same day, under the same conditions, in the same order, at comparable freshness, and at precisely the same level of hunger (“Hunger is the best sauce,” after all).

That is impossible.

The Slice Index is therefore my best effort to evaluate pizza in a disciplined, consistent and transparent way while acknowledging that eating pizza remains stubbornly different from conducting a clinical trial.

Data Gaps

The Slice Index existed in less organized forms before this website did.

Some older entries, particularly those from before 2020, therefore have only a score, a photograph, or a short note rather than a full review.

That does not mean they were scored according to a different system. Mostly it means I was less diligent about documenting what I was already doing.

Where better historical material exists, I add it.

Where it does not, I would rather preserve an incomplete record than invent one.