Features

by Ann Christenson. with additional reviews by Kurt Chandler, Dan Murphy, Evan Solochek and Alex Vagelatos.
photo by John Cizmas

“What kind of crust do you like?”

Raise the topic of pizza to locals and watch their reaction. The eyes widen, brows lift to the sky. The hands start waving, gesticulating, like in a game of charades. Amazing, the reaction to pizza. It’s absolutely visceral.

Chicago has its deep-dish pizza; New York its wide slices with a chewy, bready outer crust. Some pie eaters would argue that Milwaukee doesn’t have its own style of ’za. Perhaps that’s true. There is the pizza of Zaffiro’s fame: thin and crisp as a saltine, topped judiciously, not extravagantly. There’s the amoeba-shaped pies topped with Tang-colored sauce at Maria’s. Milwaukee being a melting pot, there’s a puffy, bubbly crust topped with garlic sauce baked by a native of the Ukraine. And the trend of topping slices with mac and cheese or steak and French fries has taken the town by dough hook.

It could be this diversity that makes Milwaukee a great pizza town. It certainly stirs up some boisterous debate. And we love debate. Almost as much as we love eating pizza. We ate a lotta lotta pizza in preparation for this story – many places that didn’t make the cut, so to speak. But these 40 top pizza places merit your deep, undivided attention. Over a large pepperoni and a beer.