I’m a very curious and competitive restaurant guy. But, not only competitive in the traditional sense, yes sales are important. But to me, putting the best product out for my customers is imperative. The sales will follow. How many of you have the best pizza in your trade area? Bar none, no one else’s is better. Your customers not only tell you, but you know it, deep down inside, yours is the best. And maybe that doesn’t matter to you. That’s ok; this isn’t a debate about the importance of quality and taste. Please ignore this post if it doesn’t apply to you and your restaurant. But, I’d love to hear from those that serving the best tasting pizza matters. Is it you?
Yep. I have the awards to back that up as well.
Absolutely hands down. Now…what did you expect folks to say?
Seriously though, we have one local chain that is past it’s glory days, and one Hut…oh yeah and a Casey’s Gas station if you count that as pizza.
NEVER throw away any of your competition! Casey’s pizza is not bad; not great, but I’d put it a step above LC, Dom, and PH. It’s a bit overpriced is the main problem, esp slices.
The term best is an inherently subjective phenomena . For example, I like thin-crust, NY style pizza with certain sauce and cheese ratios, textures and flavors and what I make I perceive as best. It always amazes me, though, as to the diversity of people’s preferences. Best would probably refer to the shop that has ability to consistently produce a pizza that has maximum popular appeal. However, as we know in politics, those that are elected via the maximum popular appeal principal and often not what we as individuals would perceive as best.
I truly believe that mine is the best. When you get between 1800 and 2000 orders every week in a town of only 2500 people you know you are. We get customers all the time from that come from 20 miles away from towns that have 20+ pizzerias. It has be the best.
I never entered any contests or won any awards. Too busy to do that. I do think that what makes our pizza the best is the unique characteristic’s of it. I have searched 100’s of recipes for dough and never came across anything close to mine. I bet even the dough doctor never heard of it. We have a blend of 6 spices for sauce and we mix provolone and mozzarella cheese at a certain ratio for our pizza cheese.
Maybe part of being the best is to have a unique flavor that entices customers to come back over another pizzeria.
As mentioned, “best” is a very subjective term. So I would rephrase the question as: Is there anything you could do, to make your pizza better? (In your mind - not someone elses) In my case, no. If I thought anything could improve our pizza, I would do it.
We have our place in a rural part of Alabama. There is two other places within 30 miles that offer pizza (Subway and Hunt Brothers). So I honestly say that ours is the best around. We make every order fresh. On the flip side i’m always looking for ways to improve my quality.
It’s all in the perception.
We have had many customers try pizzas from the place that has won two “world titles” and is now an institution here and say that ours beat them hands down.
Balance this to some absolutely terrible reviews on Urbanspoon where any reader would wonder why our place is still in existence to another review site (genuine reviews only, unlike urbanspoom who allow malicious vindictive often false reviews to be posted) where we have 5 star rating across our reviews.
Like “Pizza of the Month” we let our customers be the judge and the continual sales growths against new competition, construction distruptions to our centre and continual media negative reports on the economy, tell us we must have a good product.
Customers continue to come back and new customers come everyday after hearing of us. We do little advertising as none tried have any tangible results, we have the 3 big franchises around us at prices less than half ours, yet we continue to grow substantially.
Are we the best ??? Who knows ?
What we do know that customers like our product and they like us as people.
That’s all that matters in this subjective question.
Dave
Short Answer : Yes
Long Answer : Being the best tasting, as Dave pointed out, is very subjective. We have the best in the area by far, but we are not the busiest YET 
To make a successful pizza place you need more than great food, you need atmosphere, marketing, convienience etc.
There are many examples in every industry were the best product as failed because they didn’t have a complete package.
Is having the “best” pizza relevant to making money?..There usually has to be some balance between quality and cost…I think if you have the “best” pizza it will be out of reach of your average customers on a regular basis…So at the end of the day you have to come up with a product that satisfies most of your clients most of the time in order to sell in the volume required to be profitable…