Outrage: New 'Best Pizza Cities' Report Snubs Connecticut

CONNECTICUT —The pizza insults, they keep on coming.

It was just about a year ago when the editors of Food & Wine magazine named Connecticut second, behind New Jersey, on their List of the Best Pizza States. Now, personal finance website Anytime Estimate is placing Detroit — Detroit! — at No. 1 on their list of The Best Pizza Cities.

More incomprehensible still, the closest any Connecticut burg comes to the top of the list is Hartford at No. 33. New Haven did not even earn a mention.

How embarrassing. For Anytime Estimate.

Declaring that "Motown is Dough Town" (pardon me while I slam my forehead, hard, on the desk), the Anytime Estimate epicures then proceed to ignore anything that makes a pizza worth eating in favor of obscure stats such as the number of independent pizza joints per population, or how many times residents search for them online. They ranked Ohio as the best state for pizza, with Cleveland and Columbus also appearing among the top three towns.

To be fair — which we're not inclined to be, when it comes to pizza — Anytime Estimate is a finance website, whose editors are better equipped to wonk out on asset liquidity than tomato sauce fluidity. Their judges don't debate "crisp" versus "chewy" in their analysis, they calculate what percent of a resident's annual income would be lost if they bought one pepperoni pizza a week.

See Also: CT Pizza Is Second Best In The Nation: Food & Wine Magazine

Tragically, we're not joking about the "annual income" bit. Other dubious considerations in the website's sad methodology include average price of a cheese pizza and the number of independent pizzerias per 100,000 residents.

Here's Anytime Estimate's list of "The 50 Best Pizza Cities," and the benchmark scores that landed them in the Pizza CPA Big Leagues:

That's right, Bunky: Nowhere in the criteria does it say anything about taste. Instead, to earn a slot in the Top 15 a city needed to have a pizza place every 2.1 miles, compared to 2.8 for the average in the study. This might have been a meaningful criterion, if we weren't all driving everywhere, here in 2022. Aren't there cars in Detroit?

Clearly, the whole methodology was gamed against Connecticut from the start. More than 43 percent of the metrics were based on (a) Google Trends stats, and (b) passion. Now, nothing in Connecticut "trends," on Google or elsewhere. That's not a flaw, that's part of our charm, a skill we practice dutifully, and teach proudly to our children. And here in the Land of Steady Habits, we don't get excited.

See Also: Hail To The King: Connecticut Pizza Again Named No. 1 In Nation

The personal finance site calculated Hartford's "Pizza Passion" score as 71.7, compared to 100 in Detroit. Hartford residents also spend 0.97 percent of their income on pizza annually, and travel an average of 2.4 miles for a cheese pie, which typically costs them $12.52.

Not that any of that matters, of course.

Understand that none of this is meant as a slight against Detroit-style pizza, which is really, really, good, and rightfully enjoying a moment. But when you come gunning for The King, you need to bring more to the red-and-white checkered table cloth than spreadsheets and search engine optimization.

See also: 2 Connecticut Restaurants Make Daily Meal's 101 Best In U.S.

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