In New York City, pizzerias are far more pervasive than Starbucks. It seems there’s one on every street, and native New Yorkers like myself grow up on pizza by the slice, eating a piece when money is tight and ordering a pie when it’s time to celebrate. We’re particular about this combination of dough, cheese and sauce, and in our experience, it is really easy to mess up. We’re loyal to our favorite pizzerias – the rest are awful! – and we don’t necessarily agree on what makes a perfect slice. I believe we judge it simply based on where we ate it as kids.


^{Ciro's Pizza}

My ideal is a balance of crust, sauce and mozzarella in which no element subverts the others. A giant clump of cheese is annoying and difficult to chew, and can inspire anxiety over the public humiliation (or death) that might ensue should you start choking. Too heavy a crust and it’s crisp on the bottom but soggy and doughy beneath the sauce. Too much sauce and you can’t taste anything else. Too much of everything is just dense. And if dense is a descriptor for even one aspect of a slice, I not only consider it a pizza fail, I feel sick afterward.

Sauce shouldn’t be sweet or taste like it was dumped straight from a can. Crust needs to be salted, and I like mine crisp enough underneath that it almost cracks when you fold it, but doesn’t butcher the roof of your mouth. I prefer the ends lightly golden and lightly crisp, yet fluffy and soft.

The cheese is always best when it’s on a brand new pie, just out of the oven. Upon reheating, mozzarella can become too elastic or broken and greasy (atop a too crunchy and borderline burnt crust), but some places nail it. Let’s face it – eating in the pizzeria, most pizza by the slice is reheated before hitting your paper plate. A great pizzeria can get that cheese to a near-liquid stringiness, even when it’s cooled enough to no longer turn your mouth into a useless, second-degree burn. 

I took my difficult-to-meet standards on a taste test around urban San Diego, limiting my hunt to the city, and leaving out our Neapolitan/artisan favorites like Bruno (wood fired), Urbn (brick oven), Basic (coal fired), Blind Lady Ale House (farm to table) and Blue Ribbon (wood fired).

Based on my criteria, Urban San Diego’s three best spots for New York-style pizza by the slice are:
Bronx Pizza (Hillcrest)
Sicilian Thing (North Park)
Ciro’s Pizzeria (Gaslamp)

Pizzeria Luigi (Golden Hill) follows closely behind. I find the sauce a bit tomato-pasty in flavor and I’ve gotten a few overcooked, overly crunchy slices there, but when it’s good, their crust is perfect – crispy on the underside, puffy on the end, and one of the best in flavor.

A Brooklyn Pizzeria (Hillcrest/North Park border) is also great. Their sauce is fantastically garlicky, and the cheese perfectly melted upon reheating. The end crust has the doughy quality I love, but on the one slice I ate there, the bottom crust was too thick and soft for me.

While Lefty’s (North Park) and Berkeley (Gaslamp) are Chicago-style pizza by the slice and not my area of “expertise,” they deserve a mention here. Everything about Chicago style thick crust (and my beloved Sicilian!) laughs in the face of my rules for a perfect pizza, but it reminds me of the need to step out of my comfort zone. I do feel that sauce shouldn’t be on top of mozzarella – if sauce, with its tangy, sweet, acidic intensity, hits your tongue first, the flavor of the mozzarella is lost, leaving the cheese merely a texture. But texture is where thick Chicago pizza shines. Both Lefty’s and Berkeley’s crusts are thick but light and with notes of olive oil, and all the layers pile up into a strange set of textures, making their pizzas addictive and even fascinating to eat.

We all have different taste in pizza, for a variety of reasons. So, leaving out the gourmet style and focusing on the street food variety, what’s your favorite pizza by the slice in San Diego? And why do you love it?