I married an Italian girl from Northeast Ohio, and she cooks homemade pizza for our family two or three times a month. Her crust is crisp, her sauce is perfect, and the overall presentation is delicious. Her mother’s pizza is nearly as good, and over the years, I have simply been spoiled with an abundance of yummy pies. I can no longer eat at Papa Johns. If forced, I can barely stomach a few pizzas from Domino’s. Bad pizza exists everywhere around us. Fortunately, Cleveland is fighting against it.

Northeast Ohio is saturated with pizza shoppes. When I first moved to Lake County, someone told me that Lake County, Ohio has more pizza places per capita than any other place in the country outside of New York City. I don’t care enough about the validity of this stat to research whether it is true or not; what I know is that there are so many pizza shoppes on every corner that the stat is believable.

Unfortunately, there is not yet a definitive rankings list for Northeast Ohio. Every few years, a different publication will conduct a competition where the voters can decide which pizza is best. But these types of things are inevitably flawed, since the restaurant with the best social media presence will win because they do the best in getting their regular patrons to stuff the ballot box. Additionally, far too many people are fooled when it comes to evaluating a pizza. To a pizza connoisseur (like me), toppings are irrelevant 98% of the time. A pizza’s quality really comes down to its sauce and its crust. Therefore, pizza should be graded on a 40-point scale: