Pizza Pie Face Off: Searching for the Best Slice in Seattle

If you talk to anyone who loves food in Seattle, you’ll hear a lot of lamenting about how the city is bereft of excellent pizza. If you consider New York the source of top-notch slices, then Seattle couldn’t be farther away in proximity. But distance shouldn’t determine everything, right? So, where are Seattle’s best slices?

That’s what I set out to discover with compadres-in-taste-testing Julia Massey and Eva Walker. Massey lived on the east coast for much of her life; if anyone has been exposed to a lot of excellent pizza, it’s her. (For added fun, we brought her 3-year-old son Carl along to a few places with us.) Eva is a life-long Seattleite and cares about food more than just about anyone I know—she even once aspired to be a competitive eater!

Together, the three of us hunted for the best places you could get a slice all over the city, seeking the most simplified variety of pizza—cheese—and visiting nine spots from Ballard to White Center, which were chosen based on reputation and crowd sourcing. We judged the slices on five categories: the crust, flavor, vibe of the place, how long it took to get the slice, and how excited we’d be about taking home a whole pie of it. Each category was rated from 1 to 10, with a possible high score of 150.