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Nancy Silverton’s great, but Alice Waters and Ed LaDou were the ones who established pizza as a blank slate years before Pizzeria Mozza.
I think it’s missing a ramen restaurant if we’re talking places that really changed the conversation. Maybe Santouka or Jinya as a couple of the relative OGs, or Tsujita as the biggest name.
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Good call
But that was more than 20 years ago, no?
Sure, but that doesn’t make Nancy Silverton an innovator. “California” pizza as a blank slate had been around for 25 years when Mozza opened.
Maybe she wiped the slate clean and started over. I don’t agree with some of the listings in that article (Four Horsemen???), but I don’t think you can argue that Mozza wasn’t influential even if it wasn’t the first of its kind.
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Pizzeria Mozza was influential in LA, but it seems absurd to list it among the top restaurants in the country 2005-2025. I don’t think any pizzeria that opened in that period makes the cut.
Well, no one’s gonna agree with everything on the list.
Anyone who agrees with Hillary Dixler Canavan that “Pizzeria Mozza inspired a host of chefs to think of pizza as a blank slate” doesn’t know enough about the history of pizza in the US. In reality, the pies at Pizzeria Mozza mostly stuck and still stick a lot closer to traditional toppings than Ed LaDou’s at Spago, California Pizza Kitchen, and Caioti Pizza Cafe. The only pizza chefs I can think of that came along after LaDou and are influential enough to justify similar hype are Anthony Mangieri and Chris Bianco, but both have been in business since before 2005.
That said, best pizzeria in the country that opened in 2005 or later, Pizzeria Mozza’s as reasonable a candidate as any.