Latest Best-City Clickbait Has Ingredients For Worst Pizza List

CHICAGO — Don't believe the fake pizza news circulating on social media.

The latest "definitive list of the best cities for pizza" — based on AnytimeEstimate.com's statistical computation of demographics, Google search trends, cheese pizza prices and three list-making publishers, including Pizza Today — is a bunch of bunk.

Detroit is not now, nor ever will be, America's No. 1 pizza city.

And there's no way that Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, should actually rank as the No. 2 and No. 3 "pizza cities" in the USA.

What the website's data crunching actually determined is which cities have the most cheap pizza joints per capita.

That's why cities including Philadelphia and St. Louis, Tampa and Minneapolis all rank higher on the "Pizza City" list than Chicago.

And Milwaukee, of all places, ranked a spot higher than No. 22, New York City.

The "definitive" pizza city list doesn't consider why a pie costs about a buck more than the national average in Chicago, home to 50 percent fewer pizza joints per capita than Detroit, Cleveland and Columbus.

Chicagoans have extremely high pizza standards.

The White Sox made the mistake of selling slices of Chicago-based DiGiorno pizza, a brand almost exclusively sold in supermarket freezers. But the team was smart enough to bring in Beggars Pizza, a sit-down Chicago pizza chain, once the ill-advised contract for frozen pies expired.

In America's supposedly No. 2 pizza town, the Cleveland Browns still sell DiGiorno pizza at First Energy Stadium.

Let's face it, some tourists come to Chicago to eat pizza — from iconic deep-dish pies to cracker-thin crusts topped with tasty Italian sausage, salty mozzarella and sweet sauce and cut in tiny squares.

It's safe to assume pizza-eating tourists, not locals, helped make our town No. 1 in Google searches for "Chicago-style pizza."

Still, pizza Twitter wants us to believe in a best pizza city list that ranks Indianapolis ahead of Chicago and New York City because Hoosiers were the No. 1-ranked Google searchers of "taco pizza."

New Yorkers were even downgraded on the list because their Googling did not show an "interest in different styles of pizza." And the Big Apple had a half the number of independent pizza shops per capita than the average in 50 cities.

But for me, the biggest reason to doubt the findings of a clickbait website is the determination that Chicago ranks as America's third-best deep dish pizza city — behind Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina.

When I Googled details about the North Carolina deep-dish scene, the best places to get a thick pie in Charlotte are a joint called "Matt's Chicago" and the Chicago-based pizza chain, Rosati's, according to Yelp.

Frankly, nothing about the pizza-city rankings makes much sense.

Besides, there's no need for ham-handed data manipulation to start a Twitter war.

All you have to do is tell the truth: Detroit pizza is fancy garlic bread.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots.

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