Polydish city guide

Best Pizza in Toronto

“UNESCO recognizes the art of making Neapolitan pizza as intangible cultural heritage—a craft, not just a meal.”

What the real thing tastes like

Pizza is an Italian dish typically consisting of a flat base of leavened wheat-based dough topped with tomato, cheese, and other ingredients, baked at a high temperature, traditionally in a wood-fired oven. The term pizza was first recorded in AD 997, in a Latin manuscript from the southern Italian town of Gaeta, in Lazio, on the border with Campania. Raffaele Esposito is often credited with creating the modern version of pizza in Naples at the end of the 19th century. In 2009, Neapolitan pizza was registered with the European Union as a traditional speciality guaranteed (TSG) dish. In 2017, the art of making Neapolitan pizza was included on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage. Pizza and its variants are among the most popular foods in the world. Pizza is sold at a variety of restaurants, including pizzerias, Mediterranean restaurants, via delivery, and as street food. In Italy, pizza served in a restaurant is presented unsliced, and is eaten with the use of a knife and fork.

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Pizza is a flat canvas of leavened dough topped with tomato, cheese, and whatever else calls to you, baked hot and fast—traditionally in a wood-fired oven where the heat does the real work. Born in southern Italy around the 10th century, it became the modern pizza we know through Naples in the 1800s, and by 2017 UNESCO had recognized the craft itself as intangible cultural heritage. Today it's everywhere: in restaurants with knife and fork, in your hand on the street, frozen in grocery stores, even cooked at home from a kit.