Disclaimer: I am a thoroughbred Californian, born and raised in LA, so I'm very familiar with the pizza characteristic to this region.

I abso-fucking-lutely love pizza and it's been something of an obsessive hobby of mine for most of my life and one thing I absolutely cannot get over is the fact that California produces objectively bad pizzas.

Here the focus is much more on the toppings than seemingly anywhere else. It's all about what you can cram onto a pizza and having a menu where you can get a pizza with 500 different toppings is somehow seen as the hallmark of a "good" pizza place.

There's not that much attention paid towards things like the sauce or the bread and places that do focus on that are treated as "upscale" or else you pay a premium for it. There aren't that many places that do a good, basic, affordable pizza. I think this is contributed to, in large part, the influence of places like CPK and other quasi-upscale dining places that serve these kinds of pizzas without a strong understanding of how to actually just make a good pizza to begin with. They can't make a solid basic pizza so they compensate by piling on a bunch of toppings and using them as value-add items.

A pizza is deemed good if you throw the entire vegetable garden on it rather than the crust or the sauce or the cheese being good.

This contributes to low-quality pizza because there is very little attention paid to the parts that actually make it a pizza and consequently you have what might be otherwise good toppings that are there seemingly to mask the poor quality ingredients underneath.

The selection of toppings is generally pretty offensive as well. A lot of strong flavors that obliterate any hint of the sauce or cheese underneath to the point where it sort of begs the question of why even bother putting it on a pizza if it's basically just a really strong tasting salad with some tomato sauce and cheese served on bread.

To be clear, the variety of toppings is odd but it's not what I am citing as the source of the problem. The source is the fixation on toppings and them being used as the benchmark for good, affordable pizza in lieu of the crust, the sauce, or the cheese.

CMV.