The great pizza search persists

More than 220 readers wrote in after David Shaw’s Matters of Taste column ran last week (“Still Looking for Love in L.A.,” May 11), almost all of them agreeing about the absence of great pizza in Los Angeles, though many offered the names of favorite pizza parlors.

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I really agreed with what David Shaw had to say about pizza in L.A., which is saying a lot considering I’m from here and I’ve always bristled at any type of “New York this” is better than “L.A. that” comparisons.

You can’t judge a pizza until you’ve eaten half of it. You have to hang in there and enjoy its range from piping-hot to medium-warm to truly see what is happening with the crust and how it meshes with the sauce. A couple slices in and you are enjoying yourself. As it fills your stomach and you hit slice three and four, the pizza endorphins kick in and the Angel of Pizza Loyalty sprouts her wings.

As an Angeleno, I’ve always searched but been underwhelmed by the pizza I’ve found. And whenever my buddies and I did find a good pizza, the owner would sell the place or change the recipe.

Dave Crouch

Encino

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Enjoyed your piece. I was reminded though of when I, an L.A. native, lived in New York City for three years in the early ‘90s, and couldn’t find a decent burrito to save my soul. We Southern Californians banded together and tried, Lord, how we tried, to buy the ingredients needed to make a simple bean, cheese and rice burrito, comfort food to all of us -- but we couldn’t pull it off.

Julie Tilsner

Long Beach

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David SHAW’S article was not a critical analysis of comparing regional cuisines, it was not an expose of a California chef’s spin on traditional dishes, nor was it a treatise of the proper techniques that create a delicious pizza. No, this article was an assassination of some fine restaurants in the Los Angeles region that happen to make pizza that Mr. Shaw does not care for. What was truly disturbing in the article was Mr. Shaw’s shameless plugging for his friend’s book, “Pizza: A Slice of Heaven” by Ed Levine.

Mr. Shaw and Mr. Levine were on the James Beard Foundation awards committee together. Wow, what a coincidence! Mr. Shaw and Mr. Levine sit on the same committee and then Mr. Levine writes a book that doesn’t appear in the top 50 of any bestseller lists and then bingo, we see an article that mirrors the message of Mr. Levine’s book.

By the way, you can keep your New York pizzas. My preference for pizza outside of California will begin and end with Chicago deep dish.

John Paul Lopez

Arcadia

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David Shaw replies: Ed Levine is a professional acquaintance, not a friend. We probably sat together, along with more than a dozen other journalists, at six or eight meetings of the Beard restaurant awards committee and have had perhaps two or three professional meals together. I was not trying to promote his book and mentioned it only briefly. Given his research, traveling around the country eating pizza every day for a year, it would have been foolish not to call upon his expertise for my column.