The Best Pizza in Canada

The Neapolitan-style pizzas come out of a wood-fired oven with properly blistered crusts, which is a fine way to anchor an otherwise wide-ranging menu of shareable rustic plates. This stylish, high-ceilinged downtown restaurant pulls in business lunches by day and groups of friends by night, and the room handles both without breaking a sweat. The Michelin Guide has selected it, and Vancouver Magazine gave it gold for Best Informal Contemporary.

Neapolitan pizza from a chef who spent fifteen years in someone else's kitchen before opening his own casual spot on Edmonton Trail. The dough is certified by one of Italy's leading associations, and the wood-fired results show it. Ranked 81st on the 50 Top Pizza World list, which for a Calgary neighborhood pizzeria is a fairly extraordinary number. The staff has the easy warmth of people who are genuinely glad you showed up.

Emmaline's is a small sit-down pizzeria in Victoria that bakes Trenton-style tomato pies, the kind with a crackly edge, a puffy middle, and pepperoni that curls into little cups of orange grease. The room looks like an antique shop with good light. On Tuesdays the kitchen swaps in a snack bar menu, so a smashburger can arrive with a pile of supermarket chips, and pie is still available for dessert.

Nina is a casual Neapolitan pizzeria, and the pies come out in about 90 seconds, which is roughly how long it takes to decide between the housemade 'nduja and the rosemary ham. The cheeses come from nearby Charlevoix, and a natural-leaning red is on hand to go with them. There are two locations, one on the tourist-heavy rue St-Jean and one in St-Roch, plus delivery to your hotel for anyone who's given up on pants. Kids are welcome.

The panzerotti here is a golden, deep-fried pocket that weighs close to two pounds, stuffed with mozzarella and pepperoni until it barely holds together. This no-frills Richmond Hill pizza joint has been around forever, and the regulars know to keep it simple. Wings and kitchen-sink salads round out the menu, but the panzerotti is the reason the place has a reputation that reaches well past the suburbs.

A by-the-slice shop on Dovercourt where the dough gets a three-day ferment before it sees any heat, which explains the audible snap when you bite in. The crust lands somewhere between New York and Neapolitan, with a flakiness that has no business being that good in a slice shop. The roster rotates, but regulars come with a preference already locked in and argue about it on the way out.

The highest praise a plant-based restaurant can get is when carnivores leave quietly impressed, and Planta in Yorkville has built a reputation around exactly that. The chef behind it trained in Michelin-starred kitchens and applies that technique to a globe-spanning menu where cashew mozzarella goes on vodka pizza and mushroom "bacon" turns up in the carbonara. Hedonistic is the right word, not virtuous.

The thin, crispy crust is the whole argument here, and the toppings are generous enough that you won't feel nickeled. Straight Brooklyn Pizza is a New York-style slice shop with several locations around the city, spinning off from the team behind Via Tevere. Order two slices and a free house-made dip comes with them, the pesto being the one to get. Good to know if you're pre-gaming Rogers Arena or BC Place and need something fast that doesn't feel like a compromise.

The dough takes three days to make, which partly explains the line of rain-soaked Vancouverites camped under the East Broadway awning. This is a casual New York pizza joint doing three styles: classic New York, Sicilian, and Detroit. The thick, crispy-edged Detroit pies in particular have developed a following that shows no signs of thinning out, regardless of weather, which in Vancouver is really saying something.