Pizza party

The pizza boom sees great chefs turning out delicious artisanal pizzas

Contrary to what we may think, pizza is not a single dish. It is a family of dishes. Even within Italy, the pizzas of Naples are far removed from the pizzas of Rome. And, in any case, the reason why pizza is such a big deal today is not Italy; it is the US.

In the early part of the 20th century, Italian immigrants to the US began making versions of the pizzas they had left behind in their home country. At that stage, most pizzas in much of Italy were not terribly interesting or even particularly popular in the North of that country. But pizza took off in the US and soon every city had its own version, the thin crust slices of New York pizza, the deep pan pizzas of Chicago, and so on.

The popularity of pizza in the US caused Italy to rediscover its own pizza traditions and as pizza became the best-known Italian dish in the world, Italians began to take a new pride in it.

In the 1980s, pizza went upmarket when the Austrian chef Wolfgang Puck started using expensive, non-traditional toppings (smoked salmon, caviar etc.) at his Los Angeles restaurant, Spago, and it has since become common for pizza chefs in different countries to use fancy and/or non-italian toppings. (Even toppings we consider traditional are not Italian anyway. Pepperoni was invented in America in the 1920s.)

So, it is hard to generalise about pizza. There is no one ideal pizza. There are many. You can do pretty much what you like and nobody can say that it is not authentic — because there is no such thing as authentic.

This means that it is very hard to pick the best pizza in Delhi or Mumbai — or New York for that matter. (In Naples, the pizza makers have very strict rules about what constitutes real Neapolitan pizza but maverick chefs are bucking this system.)

I have two personal favourites. The best pizzas in Delhi, according to me, are made by Ritu Dalmia at her café at the Italian Cultural Centre. And the best pizzas in Mumbai are

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The popularity of pizza in the US caused Italy to rediscover its own pizza traditions made by Alex Sanchez at Americano. Neither Ritu nor Alex run pizzerias but are restaurant chefs, which may have something to do with the quality of their pizzas.

Of the two, Ritu’s is nearer a conventional Roman-style pizza. (The Cultural Centre Café is meant for Italian diplomats and expats.) It is hard to get Ritu to divulge her secrets but here are two factors. One: she does not use maida but relies on durum (the wheat used by Italians for pasta) which, she says, gives her the texture she wants. And two: she uses a starter. For the last 25 years since she opened the first Diva, she has taken a bit of the dough from one day and added it to the next day’s batch. This is not unlike the process used to make sourdough and the principle is that the starter contains yeasts and bacteria that contribute to the flavour of the pizza.

Though there are so many kinds of pizza, I have always believed that there are two main pizza philosophies: either you focus on the pizza itself or you focus on the toppings. These days, many trendy pizza-makers will use exotic toppings and pay too little attention to the pizza itself. For them, the pizza is no more than a vehicle to push unusual toppings. (I have seen fried chicken, baked potato and God knows what else used as pizza toppings.)

I am not a great fan of toppings and neither is Ritu, who says that all too often pizza chefs overload their pizzas to the extent that the pizza itself becomes too limp.

Alex Sanchez is an American who fell in love with the pizzas of Naples. But, when it was time to put pizzas on the menu at

IN FINE FORM Chef Vikramjeet Roy spent months researching pizza ingredients