The only agonising decision ticket-holders to make is choosing a champion from amongst these contenders:

GIUSEPPE by The Perfectionists’ Café
tomato, buffalo mozzarella, buffalo ricotta, ‘Nduja, confit tomatoes, Parmesan

AMERICAN PSYCHO by Wandercrust
tomato, mozzarella, Ventricina salami, Roquito peppers, chilli honey

SANT ORBINO by Santa Maria Pizzeria
tomato, smoked mozzarella, salamella piccante, burrata, tarallo crumbs

CONFIT LAMB by Hai Cenato
confit lamb neck, spiced aubergine, ras el hanout, mozzarella, yoghurt, mint

TRIBUTE by Mother
tomato sauce, Bigoncia prosciutto, Parmesan, Pecorino Romano, fresh basil, oregano, black pepper

PALOMA by ‘O ver
smoked mozzarella, chiodini mushrooms, pancetta arrotolata, black pepper, fresh basil

* Vegetarian alternatives will be available for all 6 of the pizzas above.

For more information about the 2018 London Pizza Festival, click here.

What’s the most outrageous pizza topping you’ve ever tried– or sworn off ever trying? Pineapple? Spaghetti? Hot dogs? Sauerkraut? Kimchee? Pastrami? Tortilla chips?

The great Stefano Callegari of Sforno Pizza e Vino in Rome tops his Cacio e Pepe Pizza with a base layer of – I kid you not – ice cubes. I had the opportunity to ask Stefano what purpose this served when he presented this creation at the pizza show organised by Ferrarelle for the 2017 Taste of London Food Festival in The Regent’s Park.

The pizza layering with cacio (grated Pecorino Romano “cheese”), pepe (ground black pepper), extra virgin ollive oil over ice cubes was a lip-smacking hit with the Bobbies.

On a return visit earlier this month I didn’t watch the clock. I focused instead on Dom, shadowing his slow movements, tuning out the backround noise of the pizzeria and tuning in to the vocals of Claudio Villa, the “little king” of Italian song, playing on the pizza maker’s small red boombox. If ever there was music to make – and wait for – pizza by, this was it!

Colin Caplan in Naples at Pizzeria Brandi, the mythical birthplace of the Margherita pizza.

Author, historian and architect Colin M. Caplan is a great champion of New Haven-style pizza, which the locals know, according to the old dialect spoken in New Haven’s Little Italy, as apizza. He operates Taste of New Haven and the Elm City Party Bike, leading pizza tours for both, and helped organize the New Haven section of Where To Eat Pizza as the global pizza guide’s regional expert for Connecticut. For most of his life he has been as sure as red sauce is red that New Haven has the best pizza in the world.

But that was before he traveled to Italy in December to get married and, yes, eat pizza. For the location of their destination wedding Caplan and April Amellin chose the Museo della Bussola in Amalfi, a town with two claims to fame: Its spectacular coastline is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it’s one of New Haven’s sister cities.

photo by Emanuele Anastasio

For native New Haveners like Caplan and Amellin the attachment to Amalfi runs deep: There are more than ten times as many people of Amalfi stock living in the New Haven area as there are what the New Haveners refer to as Amalfitanis residing in Amalfi itself.

Caplan ate pizza on every day of his wedding voyage, from Rome to Naples to Sorrento to Amalfi. In Naples he stopped at the legendary L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele and  Pizzeria Brandi, the mythical birthplace of the Margherita pizza. “Both amazing places,” he says.

On the flight home Caplan looked down at his belly, and then out the window, gazed at the ocean dividing the old country from the new, the Italian peninsula from his Little Italy on Wooster Street, and reached this conclusion:

“The best pizza in the world, in my world of course, rests in New Haven.”

Hallelujah!

New Haven pizza was popularized in the 1920s by Frank Pepe, an immigrant from the Amalfi coast town of Maiori, 34 miles southeast of Naples. Much as I love the white clam pizza at Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana and revere apizza as one of the truly great regional styles in the pizza diaspora I wouldn’t necessarily say New Haven has the best pizza in the world, in my world. But I would be crushed like tomatoes for the famous tomato pie at Sally’s Apizza, another New Haven classic, if Colin stopped believing it was.

It’s bad enough when anyone turns their back on their hometown pizza, the pizza they grew up with, the pizza they shared with their mom and dad. But when the pizza town is Amalfi’s sister city in Connecticut and the anyone is no less of an anyone than Caplan, the bond is sacred.

I don’t wish to contemplate a world where Colin M. Caplan no longer thinks the best pizza in the world – in our world ­– looks like this biomorphic beauty:

Frank Pepe’s original tomato pie with mozzarella

In Beauty, the Design Triennial Exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt in New York, curators Andrea Lipps and Ellen Lupton define “ethereal” as it relates to design:

Designers create forms that shape space, time, light, or air, sometimes defying permanence and weight in favor of ephemeral or fleeting effects. An object or building might exist in the space between or the space left behind more than in the thing itself.

Now, try substituting “pizza bakers” for “designers” in Lipps and Lupton’s first sentence and “a pizza” for “an object” in their second sentence and see how it reads:

The artistry of Franco Pepe, Gabriele Bonci, Ciro Salvo and other master pizzaioli is found not just in the thing we eat but also in the air, the bubbles, the spaces between.

photo by Luciano Furia

Competing for pizza glory at the 13th September London Pizza Festival the team behind Made of Dough chose to showcase its Chorizo pizza topped with spicy chorizo and piquillo peppers. The pizza dudes from Brixton clearly understood a factor that I, a Margherita man, have been slow to accept:

London is a hot pizza town.

Serving the 500+ voters at Borough Market a slice with a hot-chilli kick apparently did not hurt Made of Dough’s chances at all. They took home the Pizza Bianca, the trophy awarded to the London Pizza Festival champions.

photo by Paul Winch-Furness

The classic red, white and green Margherita, with tomato, mozzarella and basil, may be the first pizza listed on most London pizzeria menus, but it is the spiciest pizzas that typically rise to the top. This appears to be as true at national chains (the Pizza Express American Hot, with hot green, roquito or jalapeño peppers) as it is at adored indies:
– The Pizza Pilgrims Nduja, a Margherita spiked with spicy ‘Nduja sausage
– The Ruben’s Bakehouse Rock ‘n Roll, ignited by spicy sausage and crushed chillies.
– The Story Deli Fast Eddie, accented with spicy sausage, chorizo, bird’s eye chillies and hot chilli sauce.

Sud Italia may have featured a pizza accessorised with fresh tomatoes and imported Margherita di Bufala at the London Pizza Festival but Silvestro Morlando, the operator of this Citroën pizza van, concedes this was not a strategic choice. His spicy Diavola pizza is always the bestseller at Old Spitalfields Market, where Sud Italia is parked. The Londoners, says Morlando, go crazy for it.

For my list of the Top 10 Pizzas in London I limited consideration to Margheritas. I concluded it was best to judge pizzas like-for-like, focusing on the fundamental elements of crust, tomato and cheese. But if London is truly a hot pizza town maybe it’s time to stop thinking like a tricoloured traditionalist and bring the best chilli pizzas into play.

Where do you stand? Are you a Margherita monogamist? Or do you like your pizza hot and spicy?

Three new fast-casual restaurants bring pizza-by-the-slice to Charing Cross road in Central London.

Here are my early takes based on single visits to NY FOLD, Fornetto and Vico.

NY FOLD

The New Yorkese way to attack a triangular slice cut from a large pizza is to fold it lengthwise, pinching the two corners at the top. This is what’s meant by “NY FOLD”.

But when I, a native NYer with decades of hands-on experience, tried to bend one of NY FOLD’s triangles down the middle it cracked instead. One large segment broke off from a corner. #NYFAIL

The crust was strangely brittle, hence the embarrassing break, but hardly bad. What will keep me from going back to this sleekly styled but tragically named slice joint, presumably a fast-casual showcase for a chain-in-the-making, is the utter blandness of the basic £3.95 Margherita slice. The red sauce may have been robust and flavourful, as the menu promises, but who could tell? Talk about scant: It must’ve been applied to the surface of the stretched dough with a nose dropper. There was ample melty mozzarella to fill you up but it desperately needed something with salt, such as grated grated Pecorino Romano. Or salt.

If you do go to NY FOLD, out of convenience or curiosity, I’d recommend, (A), your ordering something jazzier with more toppings and, (B), attacking your slice with fork and knife.

103 Charing Cross Rd, London, WC2H 0DT

FORNETTO

Snug Fornetto operates much like any pizza al taglio shop in Rome. Rectangular slabs of pizza pre-baked in a shallow tray are lined up in a glass display case. You point to the pizza variety you want. Ordinarily the server proposes various sizes by moving his cutter forward or backward, like a cheesemonger. But here at Fornetto you pay by the fixed portion, not the weight – from £3 per slice.

I like the pizza, with its airy crust, and love its location near the National Portrait Gallery, between Leicester and Trafalgar Squares. I’ll be back, even if some toppings lack punch and panache.

The Margherita (above right) was seasoned with stealth basil. I asked if we were expected to tear off fresh leaves from the potted basil sitting on counter against the wall. The charming Italian woman in charge smiled. The basil plant was intended for decoration, she explained, but if I wanted to help myself no one would stop me.

21 Charing Cross Rd, London, WC2H 0ET21

VICO

With Vico the team behind Bocca di Lupa, an acclaimed Soho trattoria, and Gelupo, a cherished London gelateria, turn their attention to quick, ready-to-eat Italian food. They call it “street food”, adopting the lingo preferred by property redevelopers, and liken the soaring, whimsically designed indoor food hall to a piazza – without, needless to say, the danger of being hit by a passing Piaggio, pigeon or panhandler.

If you are approached by a stranger on the pavement outside it will likely be by someone handing you a coupon for a free slice of Roman-style pizza al taglio. I used mine for one topped with guanciale (cured pork cheek), Pecorino Romano and pumpkin purée. It was a Halloween Carbonara, with the seasonal substitution of orange pumpkin for yellow egg, and it worked.

The crust of Vico’s pizza al taglio – £3 price for a small, 100-gram serving –  has a pleasantly crisp, with the small air pockets in its interior crumb collapsing to pressure. It feels right.

If the goal is decent pizza with good, creative toppings in a clean, upbeat environment that does much more than just pizza then make no mistake: Vico is viable, scalable, enjoyable and Westfield-ready.

But there is little evidence of craft in preparation and pride in presentation. When you approach the counter to order at a pizza al taglio shop your decision should not be an easy one: You’re picking from pizzas on display, not on a menu, and each variety should look more unmissable than the next. You should feel like a kid at an ice cream shop, overcome with excitement and paralysed with indecision.

Vico will disappoint dreamers like me who admire chef-owner Jacob Kenedy and were hoping it would accomplish for London pizza what Gelupo did for its gelato. At Vico there’s no eye candy in the pizza display case. You make your choice almost by default. It’s destination pizza only if your destination is Cambridge Circus.

1 Cambridge Circus, London, WC2H 8PA