best pizza in amsterdam.

2010 UPDATE: Since this seems to be one of my more Googleable pages, I thought I should let you all down gently: there was no Great Pizza Hunt that year, or the next, or the next. There probably won't be one this year. Because this brother is on a diet...one that pizza ain't on.

But I still have my ducky ear to the ground, and so I pick up tiny scraps of pizza info here and there. And as of May 2010, here are what I hear are the best pizzas in Amsterdam:

La Perla

Da Portare Via

Yam Yam

Renato's

Forno Communale

and after I wrote this I noticed that my list is almost exactly the same as dutchgrub's, so it must be right, right?

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ORIGINAL POST: It's taken me a while to become convinced of this, but I now think it's true: Amsterdam doesn't write about its food the way that other cities do. Google "best pizza in New York" for example. 10,000 hits. Sure, some of them, probably many of them, are pizza places boasting about having the best pizza in New York. Plus, it's New York. Substitute "Atlanta" for New York and you still get 3,000 hits. Google "best pizza in Amsterdam". I've currently got more fingers on one hand than you'll get results. Yes, I'm Googling in English. "Pizzatest" gets you 250 results, but almost none of them are useful. "Beste pizza's" and "Amsterdam" gets you 150 hits. I'm sure there's a Dutch version of the phrase that will get you a few more hits, but in general you should be getting my point.

There's another problem with food writing in Amsterdam that I'm itching to write about but I can't really get to the heart of it without directly dissing the taste buds and/or motives of several people, and yeah I'm just not really in the mood to do that the justice it deserves creatively (but Undercover Glutton, you're first on my list, and JvD you're next).

But whatever. One publication that has done a little bit of this "best of" business is the free weekly magazine NL20. They've done several tests, and while the format is OK, there are some serious flaws: in the pizza test, for example, only two pizzerias ranked higher than an 8, with most of them ranking below a 5. Certainly there are more than 2 places making edible pizza in the city, right?

So I'm going to declare that a Best Pizza in Amsterdam hunt is underway, or at least a Good Pizza in Amsterdam Somewhere Near our Apartment hunt, and even if Het Parool beats us to the publication of pizzatest results, this post is proof positive that we thought of it first. Google it, you'll see.

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Here's where I'm going to keep the (subject to change) list of pizzerias to hit.

Yam Yam
Da Portare Via
Fellini, Renato's
La Festa (on the Hazenstraat, not the Kinkerstraat)
Lo Stivale d'Oro
Italia Oggi
Pasta Vino
Da Damiano
Le Quattro Stagioni
Lagonda (one of the few Turkish-Italian hybrids we'll try, also Palorma maybe).

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