For my money, the best pizza in the world is at Coalition, in Blairgowrie, Johannesburg. How well a Coalition pie would do in a blind test taste against the best from New York or Chicago or Napoli or wherever the best pizza is supposed to be made I can’t say, though well enough, I’d suspect.
What makes Coalition pizza #1 for me is that I've eaten there any number of times with friends I see only so often because they are in South Africa and I am in Amsterdam. So send me there over whomever won the last global pizza prize . . . presuming there is such a thing.
Pizza, after all, is pretty important to the history of the race.
But pizza, unlike a bagel, is not binary.
There is good pizza and bad pizza and no doubt you have gradations of favorites. Some pizza is so bad one might even say, “this is not pizza.” But that’s just an expression.
For those who travel outside North America, though, it is not just a question of getting a good bagel, the question is if you can get a bagel at all.
Yes, there are distinctions between New York and Montreal bagels but the worst of etiher still hit the mark as the round bread pawned off as a bagel in European cities does not.
And until recently those cities included Amsterdam.
But a few weeks ago, while not writing these posts, I discovered a small shop where Jonathan, a Canadian, had been making the real thing for almost a month.
Now when I was growing up there was a commercial for a soda called “Teem” (I think. Does this still exist?) In the commercial you see a guy, his skin sun burnt and patched, crawling out of the desert and into a bar. There he says to the bartender in a kind of drawl, “Gimme some salty chips.” And then the voice over on the advertisement said: “Teem. Push your thirst to the limit.” (Or some such. )
The scratch that I can now itch via Jonathan’s bagels reminds me of that commercial.
I had no idea how thirsty I was.