Good American Pizza?

In more than 30 years that I’ve lived in the USA, I have yet to eat a great pizza; you know, one like they’re making day-in, day-out, anywhere in Europe. I have eaten pizzas in Italy of course, in Austria, France, Germany and Switzerland; and in most cases, they all where quite good, with varying degrees of presentation, taste and refinement, but the vast majority of them was better than a so-called “great American pizza.” Last summer, our daughter Charlotte took us to Zachary's Pizza in Berkeley, which is also famous all around the San Francisco Bay Area. The ambiance, the patrons and the waiting were probably what made that experience the greatest, but fundamentally it wasn’t the quality of the meal. More recently, as Evelyne and I where shopping for some tiles to re-do our kitchen, we ran into Ozzy Fife at “Arizona Tile” who recommended Settebello in Salt Lake City as the very best. As a pizza lover, my mouth had been watering for months at the ideas of finally sinking my teeth into a decent slice of that fabled Italian meal. We had tried to go there with our son Thomas when Finn was born but the place was so crowded that we couldn’t get in (a good sign, you’d think?), so last night we went and had our long awaited pizza. It was not bad, but hard to justify a 40 minutes drive from our home and circling around the block forever to find a parking spot. Oh yes, I almost forgot; their “gelato” was divine!