The history

The International Pizza Control Board, aka, The Pizza Control Board was an idea hatched one hazy hung-over afternoon in a small wood-fired pizza joint near the train station in Bordeaux, France. Inspired by a life-long love for pie beginning years before in the small Pennsylvania town were we grew up - full of Italians, Poles, Germans, Greeks, Jews, Irish, Serbs, etc., all were second and third generation Americans, still very fond of their home country's cuisine. Wolfing down pizza was a way of life! That and a beautiful sexy Italian girlfriend of Neapolitain and Calabrian descent, but I digress...

Cut back to that sidewalk in Bordeaux, where they had some of the best rustic wood-fired pies you have ever tasted and we knew we had to come up with a way (basically a ruse to eat lots of pizza) to rate and share with friends these amazing places with great pizza; as well as be brutally honest when a pie missses the mark. Pre-internet smart-phone days, we got spiral notepads and rated pizzas during that trip to France, continuing when we returned to the US. To keep it simple, we rated a pizza place one to five stars (to one decimal point) based on 6 basic criteria with a single overall average score, along with brief comments and impressions. To set a high standard, we established that a rating of 5.0 stars be considered orgasmic, pizza nirvana, damn rare, worth a trans-oceanic plane ticket. Here's the six categories:

Crust

Sauce

Cheese

Toppings

Ambiance

Wait Staff

Fast-forward forty years, thousands of pies, huge advances in technology, families and careers that consumed all our time and here we are, launching our website and app (ok, so if you're reading this already, it's all still under construction!!). PIzza has also become the number one restaurant food in the world for which our consumption alone accounts for the GDP of a country like maybe Andorra. It's everywhere, and the number of really good pizza places is an expanding universe. We hope this site will allow any traveler to find and report good pies all over the world. Thanks and watch out for strings!!

- JD & GTR, 2018

International PIZZA Control Board