Dishing Pizza
Origin Story

As Shakespeare famously had Romeo tell Juliet, “Pizza is like sex. Even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.”¹ The Bard wasn’t wrong. As such, Dishing Pizza discriminates against no pizza.

Dishing Pizza especially enjoys pizza sold by the slice. If a shop only sells personal-sized pizzas, Dishing Pizza will bitch about it, but acquiesce — even personal pizza is better than no pizza.

You’re barking up the wrong tree if you’re expecting Dishing Pizza to get into pizza technicalities like mozzarella flavor profiles or discussing where the flour is milled. Dishing Pizza takes its pizza seriously, but its underlying goal is to entertain.

Dishing Pizza is a local blog focused on pizza in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and occasionally Virginia. Posts about pizzerias in other drivable locations may occasionally appear when the Dishing Pizza team feels the wanderlust to explore new pizza horizons.

Dishing Pizza is Oven-Biased

Dishing Pizza has a pecking order of oven preferences and acknowledges that fine and crappy pizzas exist in every category.

Steel Deck Oven Pizza

Dishing Pizza’s roots are in central New Jersey, where there was a pizza place in nearly every strip mall. Dishing Pizza cut its teeth on nothing but simple New York-style pizza, baked in 5-ton steel deck ovens and served by grumpy Italian men. This background has shaped Dishing Pizza’s nostalgia for New York-style pizza, its skepticism towards wood-fired pizza, and its aversion to personal-sized pizzas.

Although New York-style remains a mainstay of carryout pizza, the encroachment of 10″ and 12″ personal-sized wood-fired pizzas is a troubling trend, indeed.

Wood-Fired Pizza

Although Dishing Pizza loves all pizza, even the bad stuff, Dishing Pizza cares about the planet. This wood-fired pizza craze is out of control. Rich people have wood-fired pizza ovens in their backyards so they can make mediocre pizza at home. 

Given that burning wood releases particulate matter and other pollutants into the air, if one uses it to cook pizza, the pizza should be goddamned great — like Timber or 2 Amys. Otherwise, why not just cook it the old-fashioned way in a gas or electric oven? 

Coal-Fired Pizza

Coal burns at a crazy-hot temperature, like up to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, and creates a superb char on pizzas. The only hotter surface for pizza-making is a DC sidewalk in August.

Although coal is an energy-dense source of energy, it burns dirty. Coal-fired pizza ovens typically use anthracite, a cleaner-burning type of coal, so those who enjoy this pizza needn’t feel responsible for single-handedly killing the environment.

Rating System and High School Geometry

Anyone who thinks high school geometry has no practical purpose has never written a pizza blog.

In a world where pizzas come in all shapes² and sizes, consumers must know when they’re being taken for a ride. Therefore, Dishing Pizza computes a price per square inch in its reviews. Anyone with a high school education may remember that a circle’s area = πr². From there, it’s easy to compute slice and pie prices per square inch.³

With its Slice Greed Factor rating, Dishing Pizza is on it if a pizzeria gouges customers on per-slice prices compared to whole-pie prices (say $5 per slice and $20 for an 8-slice pizza). Pizza joints with few 🤑 money-mouth faces are the least greedy and those with the most 🤑🤑🤑🤑 are scoundrels.

If a shop’s pizza is so-so but the place has a great vibe, the Pizza quality rating will be lower than the Overall experience rating:
Pizza quality: 🍕🍕
Overall experience: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Dishing Pizza is no fan of 🍕 or ⭐ ratings and reluctantly includes them at the bottom of its reviews because they’re expected by the hoi polloi. The scale goes from one 🍕 or ⭐ to four 🍕🍕🍕🍕 or ⭐⭐⭐⭐. Readers clamoring for five-star reviews ain’t going to find them at Dishing Pizza.

---

¹ Sophisticated readers may not recall this Shakespeare quote. It’s been variously attributed to Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Sharon Stone, so no one really knows who originally penned it.

² Circular pizza is the norm, with rectangular pizza in a close second. Cute heart-shaped pizzas appear on Valentine’s Day, and cross-shaped pizzas appear on Easter (Dishing Pizza has never actually seen one, but seldom visits Evangelical pizzerias).

³ Some knucklehead is going to claim that a two-dimensional area isn’t as accurate as a pizza’s volume (V = πr²h). Let’s nip this in the bud. Just because there’s more dough in a deep dish pizza, its extra thickness shouldn’t play into the price — the extra flour, water, and yeast in the crust cost pennies.