Connecticut + New York Lose Out to Jersey For Best Pizza Honors

This seems like a miscarriage of justice. If you've ever eaten some of the great pizza in Connecticut and New York, then you know the feeling of losing out to New Jersey.

New Jersey has Elizabeth and the smell, and Trenton, Camden, Newark, and Atlantic City are voted some of the worst towns in American to live.

Look, there are some nice spots in New Jersey, there's the Jersey Shore and the beaches, some gorgeous scenery, it's not called the Garden State for nothing. They have been know for years for their Salt Water Taffy and Hoagies, but pizza, no way, that belongs to Connecticut or New York.

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Now foodandwine.com has come up with a list of the 10 Best Pizza States in the Country, and they have ranked New Jersey at the top of the list with Connecticut in second and New York in third.

Apparently, this was not some fluke, or a New Jersey partisan taking the hometown approach, this is a trend that started well before the pandemic. Jersey had started to get a pizza buzz with what some consider some of the best pizza in the country being made in Jersey City, right across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

New Jersey also boast some of the oldest pizza joints in the country located in Trenton, where at Papa's, established in 1912, they don't even call it pizza at all, they call it tomato pie. It's a small amount of mozzarella on a very thin crust with crushed tomatoes on top. Hey, that sounds pretty good, maybe they've got something here.

Or how about at Santillo's Brick Over Pizza where you can get a pie with tons of red sauce, herbs and oil. Talk about scaling things back to the origins of the food.

Another factor to consider is that the Connecticut Neapolitan craze has now reached into every state, so Italians from all over the country can reproduce a pizza with the same zest and flare as some of the best locations in New Haven.

Now, some would consider this blasphemy, especially since it's New Jersey, but from the information I've presented, some of the selections from Jersey seem like they would be worth investigating, so maybe there's some validly in this selection. As a Connecticut resident transplanted from New York, it may be a hard pill to swallow to see New Jersey the number one spot on the best pizza in the country list, but I guess you can't knock it till you try it, and I'm up for that. How about you?