The OG followers might still remember my initial “The Styles” series from two years ago. At that time, I presented 12 pizza styles which I thought were striking enough to showcase the diversity of this dish and how it evolved into totally different interpretations across the world since its Neapolitan beginnings. Some styles are well established and every pizza lover has heard about them. However, those of you who eat pizza often have quickly noticed that in most cases it is not very straightforward to label each pie with a specific style. One of the reasons why I have such a strong fascination for this dish is the creative leeway that it offers: many variations and creations fall somewhere “in-between” different styles, morph into sub-versions of an established style, or stay completely non-categorizable no matter how hard you try.
Since the launch of this website and its Pizza Finder tool, many of you have asked me if I could include a filtering function for the respective style. This would allow for an even more efficient pizza search if you have something very specific in mind, e.g. if you’re in the mood for a “New York style” pizza in Hong Kong. This request made me go back to the original “The Styles” series and validate how much it can be applied to the 500 pizzas that I’ve already reviewed. As I started categorizing them one-by-one, I realized that some enhancements need to be made – and this is how the new and improved framework came to life: The Styles 2.0
“The Styles 2.0” covers 16 pizza styles. Same as with its predecessor version, some are already very common (well-established) and some are summarized into my own clustering concept (unestablished), because they simply wouldn’t fall into anything that already exists. On The Styles 2.0 page I am presenting the 16 categories, so you have a better understanding of the characteristics and definitions that I considered. As this is not an exact science, I will of course be happy for any type of input from you. This framework can be continuously refined and improved. In a first step, I differentiate between the well-established and unestablished styles, and in a second step I give a brief description of each style including examples of where you can find them in Hong Kong.