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Last monthslot paraiso, The Times published a list of New York’s 25 best pizza places. Like any good New Yorker, I made sure my favorite pie was on the list, then vowed to find a new favorite. There’s pleasure in having one’s tastes affirmed by the tastemakers. Then there’s the even sweeter satisfaction of liking something no one else has discovered yet — a vanishingly rare experience in the TikTok era, when influencers trumpet their “secret” spots to eager followers and the next thing you know, there’s a line around the block at your neighborhood bakery.
What makes a food “the best” of its kind, anyway? I loved reading through The Times’s list, but it’s only of use insofar as it aligns with my own preferences — I’ll never love a pizza topped with honey, or chicken, or (controversially, I know) peppers and onions. Sam Sifton’s theory of pizza cognition resonates: It posits that a person’s primary pizza source, the pizza they grew up eating and loving, is “the pizza that will become that person’s inner optimum, the pizza against which all others are judged.”
Sam allows that tastes can change — he grew up on slices but developed an appreciation for pan pizza — but I’d argue that even if you refine your definition of the “best” pizza, your earliest taste imprint is still the one that provides the most comfort, the most familiar kind of pleasure. I may feel confident asserting that the best pizza has a thin crust, a slightly spicy sauce and a delicately balanced ratio of sauce to cheese, but the most comforting pizza I know is from a long-closed pizzeria in my hometown where the crust was pillowy and chewy, the sauce Chef Boyardee-sweet, the cheese oily and slipping off.
Comfort foods are nostalgia bombs. They’re taste biases that were inscribed early when there wasn’t a lot of other data to complicate things. They can be awakened with a smell or a bite or even the sight of a neon sign that reads “Angelina’s,” the feel of a cardboard box hot on your legs as you carry dinner — half pepperoni, half meatball — home in the passenger seat.
I have always maintained that the most comforting music is whatever you listened to in high school. It’s not necessarily the best music by any objective metric, but it’s what you listened to when you were formulating key parts of your personality, and that music will always make you feel most essentially yourself. I’d like to figure out other theories of familiarity, ways to reliably induce a sense of deep, cozy satisfaction. Maybe it’s all stuff that got to you when you were young and impressionable, the inputs around and on top of which you formulated your more sophisticated opinions. You have your grown-up tastes, built on years of living and experiencing and honing an aesthetic. And then you have the stuff — the chaotic foods you crave, the synth-heavy pop no one else can stand — that, independent of any rational appraisal, feels like home.
For moreThe best pizza in America.
Much of the joy we get from our favorite dishes stems from the memories we associate with them.
From Times Opinion, the tyranny of “the best.”
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