Rankings from a pizza tour my wife and I did during quarantine. Each place was ranked on 10 different categories on a score from 0-10. Not all vendors had scores in all categories. For example, one category is message and some places were promoting a strong message of equality and equity not tolerating intolerance. If a place did not have a "message" then that score is left blank. The final score was calculated by taking and average of the top 4 scores combined with the bottom 3 scores for each vendor (this logic was chosen to penalize for low scoring fields, and to make sure that all average scores were calculated using the same denominator. The lowest number of non empty score columns was 7 out of 10 so that is why a total of 7 scores are used to calculate the final score).
Caveat: since I am vegan, We only selected places that had at least one vegan option, or offered good possibilities for vegan options (one locally famous pizza spot which is noticeably missing from the list is Ken's Artisan Pizza. When I called them to ask about vegan options, they kind of laughed and said something along the lines of, "ugh I guess you could get no cheese?" so we did not choose to eat here because this did not fit the criteria of offering at least one vegan option)
- Taste: obviously the number 1 most important metric. This is overall taste when you take a bite of the pizza
- Presentation: did it look good?
- Crust: How was the quality of the crust? Was it stale? was it too tough? Too thin? was it just perfect?
- Sauce: Quality of the sauce alone
- Toppings: What was the quality of the toppings? Or did you appreciate having some very unique toppings? this is up for interpretation
- Creativity: Did they offer creative pizza combinations (e.g. Lovely's Fifty Fifty puts flower petals on their pizza)
- Message: Did they promote a message (e.g. social justice) that you are in favor of? (or against?)
- Availability: Did they have options that you wanted or were excited about?
- Sides: Did they offer exciting side orders? Or were the side orders you got good?
- Leftovers: (If applicable) how good were the reheated leftovers the next day?
Honorable mention: Pizza Creature - we tried this place after we had stopped scoring, but this place is very very good and is close enough to us that it has become our go to pizza place. It likely would have landed in Alex's top 5, but definitely would have been top 10.
Didn't hold up: Fino Bistro - this place is also nearby where we live and the first time we ate here we both found it to be very good. We have since eaten there approximately 5-6 times and it has gotten progressively worse with every visit in almost every category. This is not reflected in the scoring, but do keep in mind that the scores are always based on first impressions and a single instance of eating there