The Best Pizzerias In St. Louis - Part I

The Setup:

St. Louis native Yogi Berra once replied, “You better make it four. I don't think I could eat eight” when asked how many slices his pizza should be cut into. I've always been fond of this quote, not just because its classic Berra, but because in many ways it captures the American experience with pizza.

As a society who tends to revel in our own over indulgence, it is pizza that arguably sits at the top of the food chain as the meal we eat to excess. We consume the dish on a massive scale, usually from cardboard boxes and frozen cases, instead of freshly pulled from the blistering heat of a pizzeria's oven, which is arguably the only way to truly commune with a pizza.

There are only a handful of dishes in the American diet that have experienced the culinary version of manifest destiny that pizza has. From the hand tossed pies the size of car tires and coal oven blistered doughs of the East Coast to the West Coast take on the Midwestern deep dish, the very idea of pizza is continually borrowed and tweaked to make something just a bit different from the dish a town over, yet familiar enough to wet the appetite when the heady smell of a pizza pie baking in a rocket hot oven first hits the nose. 

Locally, St. Louis has been in the midst of a pizza renaissance, with a host of pizzerias successfully fighting for elbow room at a table dominated by the ubiquitous St. Louis style pizza. Indeed, when I originally asked for help finding the best pizzas St. Louis had to offer, I fully expected to spend some time making my way though the roster of locally famous pizzerias serving up cracker thin pies, covered from edge to edge with toppings and Provel, a uniquely St. Louis cheese product that more than anything is the ethos of the St. Louis style pizza.

Instead of the traditional favorites, folks came out in numbers for pies that are at the forefront of the changing face of pizza in St. Louis. I took your feedback and set out to find and rank what I think are the best pizzas in St. Louis, based on the votes of the readers of this site, starting with numbers ten through six.