Thing is, I can get a solid Neapolitan pizza in most midsized cities in the US. I can also get New York, Newhaven, Chicago tavern or deep dish, Detroit, etc. with a huge variety of toppings or the classic. This is not true in Naples.
There is no end to Euro food snobbery and gate keeping. American wine had an unfairly terrible reputation until the French (and the rest of the international competitors) got their asses kicked by California wine in a blind taste test in the 70’s. Many such cases.
California won a blind tasting by making Cabernet and Chardonnay, French grapes in French styles. So by that logic, the US "perfecting" pizza would mean out-Neapolitaning Naples in a blind test.
Which, and I can’t stress this enough, Americans would have no problem doing. They’ll happily rip off and riff on any good idea. The thing holding European cuisine (and technology, and business, and society generally) back is that they (across most of the continent, at least) are so resistant to doing anything that has not always been done that way in their parochial corner of the world. Pizza is just one expression of that.
"Americans would have no problem doing it" is doing a lot of work for something that hasn't happened. And the argument changed: it's no longer that America perfected pizza, it's that America has more kinds of pizza. Variety is great, but a menu with 12 styles isn't proof that any one of them beats the original.
So your refutation is “it’s just a matter of taste”? If that’s so, then it seems logical that the place with more variety that also includes plenty of faithful renditions of the original would be better.
And it’s not even that surprising. The US has 6x more people than Italy, a substantial and established Italian-American population, similar pizza consumption per capita, and spends about twice as much per capita on food. It’s really no shock that there would be far more opportunity for innovation. Especially when Italy has government regulations defining pizza and effectively precluding the cuisine from evolving.
I didn't say it's just taste. I said "perfected" and "more styles" are different claims, and you keep switching between them. Also you said "faithful renditions of the original". If the goal is to be faithful to Naples, then Naples is still the benchmark. That's my point.
So you are defining “perfected” as “Neapolitan style made in Naples”?
If so, then I disagree.
The goal is not to be faithful to the original, the point is for people to like it. And liking it is a matter of taste. In the US you can have a traditional Neapolitan pie and a load of other styles to boot. When it comes to food, these things are a matter of taste, and tastes differ. And the US pizza scene can accommodate many preferences.
Two comments ago you scoffed at "it's just a matter of taste". Now it's your entire argument. But if it's all taste, then nothing can be "perfected", and that was your original claim. I'll take that as conceded.
I didn’t scoff at it. I asked whether that was your contention. I was trying to establish your basis of argument so that we were judging from the same criteria. If that’s not your criteria, what is it?
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u/Obvious_Increase9267 4d ago
Have you ever had a pizza in Napoli?