Denver Named America's Best City for Pizza. Really. (2024)

Move over New York and Chicago...

By Molly Martin

April 17, 2024

Famous Original J's is one of our favorite spots for NY-style slices, but Denver has a wide variety of pies.From the Hip Photo

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In recent years, Denver's pizza scene has evolved big time. Today, there are so many solid places to grab a slice or a whole pie that we recently replaced our top-ten list with a full-on pizza guide, broken down by style and with bonus picks for spots outside the Denver city limits.

Despite Denver's pizza evolution, Chicago and New York are still the U.S. cities most people think of when talking about the best pizza in the country. But according to a recent study by real estate company Clever, they don't even make the top ten — and Denver is number one.

The Best Pizza Cities in America: 2024 Dataranks Chicago and NYC numbers fourteen and fifteen, respectively, while the top ten are rounded out with places like Buffalo (number two), Boston (number three) and Philadelphia (number four).

After Buzzfeed posted a story about the viral backlash to the list, one local joint joined the conversation. "We've got plenty of messages regarding this article and want to give you all the space to share your thoughts," Blue Pan Pizza posted on Instagram. "What do you all think? Do we live in the best pizza city in the country?"

click to enlarge

Redeemer is one of our picks for the best pizza places in the city.

Molly Martin

To answer this, it's important to know how Clever created its rankings. This list isn't saying that Denver has the best pizza, period.

Instead, its number-one spot was determined by a number of factors that include "pizza reputation, based on a survey of 1,000 Americans" — which is a very small sample size; "rate of pizza restaurants per 100,000 residents; pizza passion, based on local internet search activity for 34 pizza-related terms (e.g., 'pizza near me,' 'pizza delivery,' 'pan pizza,' etc.); average Yelp rating for pizza restaurants; average price of a large cheese pizza; average price of a large pepperoni pizza; share of median annual income required to purchase one cheese pizza each week for a year; and share of median annual income required to purchase one pepperoni pizza each week for a year."

Denver is specifically cited as "earning positive Yelp reviews," and Clever notes, "Denver pizza is easily affordable for the typical resident." The Mile High also "scored an 82 out of 100 in our pizza passion metric, which measures how often locals are searching Google for pizza-related terms."

click to enlarge

Joy Hill's pies are made with sourdough crust and locally sourced toppings.

Molly Martin

So Denver is definitely hungry for pizza, we can generally afford it and, after downing a pie, diners using Yelp are pretty likely to give it a good review.

But Denver's pizza scene still gets plenty of criticism. Our theory: You have to work harder to find certain styles here. For example, if you're from the East Coast and used to having endless options for a quick slice, you might find the lack of slice shops here frustrating.

On the other hand, we love the diversity of the local pizza scene. Because Denver is a magnet for people relocating from all over the country, we have a plethora of options, from Neapolitan and Detroit-style to the square-cut tavern pies of the Midwest to New Haven-inspired, wood-fired pies. Our favorite emerging trend is sourdough-crust pies topped with creative combinations of locally sourced ingredients, which you can dig into at spots like Redeemer, Joy Hill and the Greenwich.

Five years ago, it might have been nuts for Denver to land anywhere near the top of a pizza-focused national list. But that has definitely changed, and we're hungry to watch this cheese-covered evolution progress.

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Denver Named America's Best City for Pizza. Really. (2024)

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