As we head into Super Bowl weekend, you’re probably in the midst of planning out the food spread you’re going to host and/or absolutely f*cking obliterate at that big party on Sunday. When it comes to the Super Bowl, there are a few staples that are absolute musts — you have to have great chips and salsa, wings are stone cold hit, and who doesn’t love to pair an icy beer with a delicious slice of carb-loaded pizza?
Without that mighty trifecta, is your Super Bowl party even really a party? We say no. But making pizza while engaging with the game and friends is… a challenge. So as you plan out that Sunday spread, we’ve decided to help you decided where to order your pies.
We’ve hit all the big national brands in a big ranking of the best pizza your party-fund money can buy. Considering pizza comes with a variety of toppings and combinations (one of the food’s many strengths), ranking pizzas in a completely fair way is a difficult task. We made it easier on ourselves by sticking with the old classic, pepperoni. But we’ll also be sure to pay extra attention to the tasting notes of both the crust and sauce and, in the spirit of sports, assign a one to five score for each, as well as a score for the pepperoni.
This should help you to make confident choices with whatever topping combination speaks to you the most. Let’s eat, but first…
What Makes A Good Pizza A Good Pizza?
When it comes to pizza, I’m pretty picky. In my opinion, few things can compete with the magic of a big foldable New York City slice from a giant 18-inch pie, but it’s been a minute since I’ve been on the east coast (damn you, covid!) so I’ll settle for any corner pizza joint that can attract long lines and fresh slices, or making my own at home with fresh-made dough fermented for 24 hours minimum.
Good pizza dough is deliciously chewy, foldable, but not too bready. It should provide a light crispiness, but not have the texture of a cracker. A great sauce is bright, but not distracting, I’m not a fan of complex and garlicky marinara sauces on pizza, I like a sauce that elevates the flavors on top of the pie without overpowering them. Cheese is cheese — almost always great as long as it doesn’t taste cheap and its fully melted.
Sound about right? Good. Now, let’s rank ‘em, beginning with the absolute worst of the worst.
15. Chuck E. Cheese — Pepperoni Pizza
Oh boy. This is the worst pizza I’ve ever had. I know including Chuck E. Cheese in the first place seems like a weird move, but some people swear by this pizza. It’s even available for delivery (who are the people ordering this? Kids with stolen credit cards?) from most food delivery services.
It shouldn’t be.
If you’ve ever attended a kid sibling or younger cousin’s Chuck E. Cheese birthday party, you’ve probably smelled the aroma of sweaty feet permeating the air. It would make sense to assume it’s all the gross kids running around, but it’s actually this pizza. HOT TAKE: Pizza shouldn’t smell like feet unless you pile parmesan onto your slices, and yet this stuff has a pungent and offensive odor that is more “socks” than “aged Parmigiano Reggianno.”
It only gets worse when you bite into it. It’s sickly sweet, almost rotten tasting, and overly salty. Just a garbage pie.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 1. Might as well be ketchup.
Crust: 2. It’s a bit on the sweet side but almost flavorless, akin to bad frozen pizza.
Pepperoni: 2. Gummy, almost steamed.
Total Score: 5
14. Sbarro — Pepperoni Pizza
This is in very close competition to Chuck E. Cheese’s horrid slice, but somehow this one feels more offensive to me. Why is Sbarro even still a thing? They haunt mall and airport food courts with their weird overly greasy-salty pizza. The mozzarella here has a weird translucent look to it, it’s almost grey, and the pizza is dripping with orange grease that will stain your plate and bleed through the paper container it comes packaged in.
The sauce is fine but way too liberally applied, it tastes garlicky and a bit sweet, and the crust is on the heavily bready side. But the worst part of this pizza —aside from the greasy cheese — are the thick slices of pepperoni. They’re cut so thick that they don’t even cook properly, instead you get a chewy ham-like slice on your pizza. This pizza truly has one of the worst mouthfeels in the game.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 2. It tastes okay, but it’s laid on pretty thick and will gush off the slice as soon as you chew into it.
Crust: 2. Too bready for its own good
Pepperoni: 1. Thick, salty, greasy, foul. Absolutely no redeeming qualities.
Total Score: 5
13. Roundtable — Original Pepperoni Pizza
When I was younger, Roundtable was the height of pizza perfection. There was a certain allure about it, maybe because it was housed in a restaurant instead of delivered in a car, but a younger version of me thought this was real fancy shit. Turns out it’s not.
The crust is a bit softer than the other pizzas on this ranking. It has a nice slightly sweet bready flavor. But the sauce is too bright, it’s attempting to taste zesty but it just comes off as sour. The pepperonis have a nice crispy edge but a soft middle that makes them a bit too chewy for my liking. Altogether, this pizza just isn’t good and for some reason costs about four times the price of 7-Eleven’s.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 1. Oddly sour.
Crust: 3. It’s very sweet, the salty pepperoni counteracts that a bit, but I imagine this would taste weird on a plain cheese pie.
Pepperoni: 2. Great on the edges, gross in the middle.
Total Score: 6
12. 7-Eleven — Pepperoni Pizza
7-Eleven pizza is a pizza of circumstance. Nobody rolls up to 7-Eleven and grabs a pie for lunch. It’s the sort of thing that you get when you stumble into a 7-Eleven after a night of partying and need a quick bite to help sober up. It’s cheap, tastes fine, but more importantly, gets the job done and we love it for that.
But when it comes to ranking pizzas sober, this is real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff.
The crust is stiff and stale, a bit like a Digiorno. The sauce is chunky like a paste and heavily sugared, though the pepperoni is nice and crispy. The presentation almost always looks like the person who made it did so with their eyes closed though. The pepperonis are never aligned right., it doesn’t matter when you’re drunk but it’s a pretty easy criticism to have when you’re paying attention.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 1. Too sweet and too thick.
Crust: 2. Stale and flavorless.
Pepperoni: 3. It’s crispy and salty, but its sloppy presentation leads to inconsistent bites.
Total Score: 6
11. Pizza Hut — Original Pan Pepperoni Pizza
It might be shocking to see a chain as huge as Pizza Hut this close to the bottom of the list but… Pizza Hut’s OG pan-style pizza is not good. It’s the reason Pizza Hut offers so many different crust options, because their OG is awful. It’s greasy, with a weird spongey almost fried dough that traps all that orange grease that explodes in your mouth with every bite. Pizza Hut’s sauce is also way too sugary and sweet, it is flavorful with notes of garlic and Italian seasoning, which might be some people’s jam but personally, I find it pretty off-putting. The pepperonis are too soft, the mozzarella cheese tastes cheap, everything about this pizza screams glorified frozen pie.
You might be wondering if I even like pizza with the constant hate I’ve been dishing out on all these chains, I promise you I do, but this pizza is by all metrics bad. The fact that Pizza Hut has been getting away with this garbage for this long is ridiculous.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 3. Sweet, thick, and sweet again. This might be the sweetest sauce of any pizza chain.
Crust: 1. What the fuck is this stuff? Pan pizza is a legitimate style that can be delicious, but this is a disgrace.
Pepperoni: 2. The pepperonis have a good flavor, but recently Pizza Hut has rolled out a new mini-cup style pepperoni and it’s a vast improvement over their stock peps. Order that instead and let Pizza Hut phase this old girl out.
Total Score: 6
10. Hungry Howie’s — Pepperoni Pizza
I don’t know if the Hungry Howie’s locations in the chain’s home state of Michigan are better or something, because I know there is a lot of love for Hungry Howie’s out there, but that’s certainly not the case here in California. This pizza is pretty middling.
The sauce has a sweetened tomato paste flavor that dominates each bite a little too heavily, the crust is flavorless, Howie’s whole gimmick is flavored crusts, so it tastes to me like they’re going for dough that acts as a canvas for the seasonings of your choice. I will give it to the pepperoni though. It’s salty, crispy, everything you want from pepperoni but I’d prefer slices a hair thinner.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 2. Too sweet and tastes cheap.
Crust: 2. A flavorless blank canvas.
Pepperoni: 3. Crispy and salty.
Total Score: 7
9. Blaze PIzza
There is a certain difficult-to-define soullessness to this pizza. Everything about it sounds like it would result in a good pie, and yet…
Blaze uses fresh dough, their mozzarella tastes like whole milk mozzarella, it’s fire-roasted, and you even have the option to sprinkle oregano or sea salt to give it a bit more flavor and complexity. But it completely lacks character.
The pizza utilizes fresh dough but it’s not even hand-tossed or slapped, instead, it’s pressed in a machine, forming a uniform perfect circle. It’s robot pizza, and it tastes like it. The ingredients never mesh together, they feel like separate parts rather than coming together as a single flavor experience, and that charred fire flavor overpowers everything.
Really not sure whether to write a 5,000 word opus or just say “not v good” and leave it at that. It’s so close to being a nice pie but it never comes together as it should. If you are ordering from here, you’re certainly better off going for a more complex group of flavors than sticking with the straight pepperoni.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 4. This is what a simple pizza sauce should be, it’s bright and tomato-forward, but not too distracting or loaded up with too much garlic and unnecessary herbs. This is by far my favorite part of Blaze pizza.
Crust: 2. The charred flavor would taste good if it didn’t overpower the entire pie.
Pepperoni: 2. The pepperoni here is a bit forgettable. Aside from some saltiness there just isn’t a lot to taste here.
Total Score: 8
8. Little Caesars — Hot N Ready Pepperoni
If you asked me before I wrote this article to guess where Little Caesars would land on a pizza ranking, I’d confidently say near the bottom. That would be wrong though. Little Caesars gets a lot of hate for being the cheap option, but I think that hate isn’t justified. This pizza is pretty good and does what the Pizza Hut pan-style pizza attempts to do, but does it right.
The crust here has that crispy pan-fried quality but doesn’t taste like it was deep-fried. It’s wonderfully spongey and isn’t quite as greasy as Pizza Hut’s. The pepperoni also isn’t bad, it has a weird flat quality to it and could be a lot crispier, but it has a good beefy flavor. The weakest aspect of this pizza is the sauce. It’s thick, about as thick as Pizza Huts, and similarly sweet, but it tastes like it was made with really low-quality ingredients. The sweetness is almost artificial.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 2. It tastes cheap and strangely artificial, likely tomato paste-based.
Crust: 3. Does what Pizza Hut tries to do with their pan-style pizza but way better. It also heats up really well, which is always a good thing with pizza.
Pepperoni: 3. It’s your standard pepperoni. It’s a bit on the salty one-note side, like a Slim Jim, but that’s to be expected with cheaper ingredients.
Total Score: 8
7. Pizza Hut — Stuffed Crust Pizza
Pizza Hut’s Stuffed Crust Pizza is almost always a disappointment. I desperately want this pizza to be good — the idea of stuffing crust with cheese makes it objectively better — but the crust itself is the problem. Sure, it’s a step up from Pizza Hut’s pan-style crust but it has no structural integrity, this pizza flops around like a scuba diver’s flipper.
The dough tastes like salted butter and overall has a “holy sh*t this is not good or my body”-soggy quality to it. The only part of this pizza I really like eating is the crust, but if you let it sit for too long the cheese inside starts to harden inside and gives the crust a gummy mouthfeel that tastes like pure salt.
Pizza Hut also doesn’t use the highest quality cheese, it tastes like skim milk-based mozzarella and has a watery taste that I find a bit off-putting the second it’s not piping hot.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 3. See entry 11 for my thoughts on Pizza Hut’s sauce.
Crust: 4. This is a hard one, I love the crust, it’s filled with cheese, but the rest of the dough is way too buttery. It’s as if someone poured movie theater popcorn oil all over it.
Pepperoni: 2. See entry 11 for my thoughts on the pepperoni. Order the mini pepperoni cups and you’ll save this pizza.
Total Score: 9
6. Papa John’s — Original Crust Pepperoni
Papa John’s is treated as the weakest link between the big three chains. Pizza Hut and Dominos are the Pepsi and Coke of the fast-food pizza world, which makes Papa John’s… I don’t know the Dr. Pepper? It’s that third option for people who are looking for something different but for some reason won’t just give their neighborhood pizza place a try. Luckily for all the odd ducks out there, Papa John’s is pretty solid.
The crust is slightly sweet, deliciously gummy, and perfectly thick. It’s flexible and foldable, and is noticeably dusted with flour, which leads me to believe it’s actually hand-tossed at Papa John’s. I don’t know this for sure, it’s just a guess! That flour mutes the flavor a bit though.
The pepperoni is also sliced thin, which helps them get nice and crispy in the oven and they are slightly bigger than your average pepperoni slices, offering great coverage across the pie. It’s a pretty solid option. Also, the garlic butter is bomb and I know there are a whole ton of diners who order this pie just for that sauce.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 3. The pizza’s weakest link. Like a lot of these chains, it’s just a bit too sweet. As the pizza sits the flavors start to move into distracting territory. It’s much more palatable when it’s piping hot.
Crust: 3. Buttery without being greasy, slightly sweet, gummy, and foldable.
Pepperoni: 4. I like them a lot. They’re a little too thin to really taste noticeably beefy, but they have a nice slightly spicy flavor to them and crispy up perfectly.
Total Score: 10.
5. Pizza Hut — Hand-Tossed Pepperoni Pizza
This should be Pizza Hut’s flagship pie. About eight years back, Pizza Hut reformulated this crust and it’s one of the best decisions they could’ve made. If we could get this hand-tossed dough with the crust from the Stuffed Crust pizza, we’d have a near-perfect pie.
It’s very similar to Papa John’s hand-tossed pizza, but it doesn’t have that liberal flour dusting that mutes some of the flavors and it isn’t as sweet. A light brush of garlic-infused butter transforms this crust and helps it to crisp up in the oven, while still retaining that chewy goodness and soft mouthfeel once you bite into it.
The pepperonis and sauce weigh this one down a bit, but right now Pizza Hut is selling a Spicy Pepperoni Lover’s pie that features both the new mini cup and standard pepperoni, as well as a newly formulated sauce that is brighter and less thick and sugary with a spicy edge. If the Spicy Pepperoni Lover’s pizza didn’t have chopped chilies, we could’ve included it in this ranking and my hunch tells me it would’ve won the top spot.
But this isn’t that. It’s close to being amazing, but it’s weighed down by a few ingredients that Pizza Hut needs to tweak.
The Breakdown
Sauce: 4. The sauce gets an added point here because the garlic butter brushed crust acts as a counter-balance to the sweetness and keeps it from overpowering the sauce.
Crust: 4.5. It’s an almost perfect crust, but something about it leads me to believe it’s not actually hand-tossed in the store.
Pepperoni: 2. It still suffers from Pizza Hut’s horrible floppy pepperoni.
Total Score: 10.5
4. Marco’s Pizza — Pepperoni Magnifico
There is so much complexity here compared to the previous entries. The Pepperoni Magnifico features two different types of pepperoni, standard-sized and mini-cups and both are delicious and mingle together beautifully. They crisp up in the oven nicely and have a peppery, spicy, and salty flavor. They’re so good you’ll want to pick a few off of your pizza just to eat them on their own (if you do, the minis taste better).
The cheese is also way more interesting here, it’s salty, a bit nutty, a little creamy, and will satisfy people who like extra cheese on their pies without actually having to order the extra cheese. It’s very distinct. The crust is also pretty solid, Marco’s puts some sort of garlic seasoning on it. I can give or take that, but the pizza itself is crispy on the outside and gummy on the inside. I just wish the crust was just a bit thicker.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 4. Remarkable. This is exactly what a good pizza sauce should be. It tastes like someone cracked open a can of San Marzano whole tomatoes, hand crushed them, and threw in some salt and a glug of olive oil.
Crust: 3. It’s good, the garlic-y crust isn’t necessary though, and if anything I feel that weighs this one down.
Pepperoni: 4. You get your standard pepperoni plus the mini cups? If you’re a pepperoni lover, this is easily one of the best in the game.
Total Score: 11
3. Domino’s — Hand-tossed Pepperoni
Domino’s is probably the brand that surprised me the most during this ranking. The quality here is higher than you’d think a national pizza chain would have — the dough is yeasty and crispy on the outside, and soft and chewy on the inside, with an airy crust and a liberal dusting of cornmeal that helps create a really great and sandy texture to this pizza.
Domino’s, like Marco’s, kicks it up a notch by brushing the crust in garlic-infused oil and it works much better than Marco’s approach. Something about how the garlic interacts with that earthy flavor from the cornmeal tastes delicious and helps to ensure that each bite of pizza is savory and full of flavor. The pepperoni is good, it’s a bit thicker than I’d like it to be but it’s adequately crispy and garlicky, with a beef-forward flavor with a slight sweet lift courtesy of the pork.
The sauce is surprisingly herbal, with a complexity to it that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s not as bright a sauce as I’d like it to be, but the way it doesn’t stain the palate keeps its complex flavor from overpowering the pie.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 4. Herbal and complex without being distracting.
Crust: 4. It’s airy, and crispy, while being soft and chewy and has a great texture courtesy of the cornmeal dusting and garlic.
Pepperoni: 3.5. For a standard-sized pepperoni, it’s has a damn good flavor. If Domino’s would drop a mini-cup version, we’d be willing to bump it up a point.
Total Score: 11.5
2. Mod Pizza — Pepperoni Pizza
When I first tried Mod Pizza I didn’t think it would end up ranking this highly but here we are. This is another build-your-own-pie-assembly-style concept, but where Blaze lacks character, this actually has some distinct flavors that taste unique to Mod Pizza.
My biggest criticism is that the crust is comically thin, it doesn’t really have much of a chew to it, but it has a really great flavor that makes up for its shortcomings. It’s yeasty and crispy, like a sourdough crust, but still retains some of the sweetness you’d get from a thicker pie. The sauce is fantastic, it really pops and introduces some sweet tomato-forward flavors that mingle perfectly with the pepperoni and milky mozzarella cheese.
The pepperoni has a slight cayenne-pepper burn to it that simmers on the palate. Aside from the thin crust, this pizza has no weak links.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 5. Bright, tomato-forward, flavor elevating, this is as close to a homemade sauce as you’re going to get.
Crust: 3. The flavor is great, but it’s way too thin to deserve anything higher than a three.
Pepperoni: 4. It edges slightly into a subtle spice territory and is one of the better-tasting pepperonis on this list. It’s not Boar’s Head, but it comes pretty close
Total Score: 12
1. Domino’s — Brooklyn Style Pepperoni Pizza
The national pizza chain scene doesn’t have a perfect pizza. There isn’t a single nationally deliverable pizza out there that can match the flavors of a New York City slice. Accept that. Nothing being driven to you from a chain after being assembled by underpaid teens matches the focused and complex flavors of a scratch-made pizza cooked with a proper pan (or better yet a wood-fired oven), and there is a high chance that there is an independent pizzeria in your neighborhood that will blow every national pie on this list out of the water. So if you’re willing to put in the effort to make you own pie or take a chance on a local spot, we highly suggest you do that.
But if you don’t want to… get the Domino’s Brooklyn Style pizza. Every time. I mentioned in the intro to this piece that I think the best pizza comes out of New York (sorry Chicago) but having said that this doesn’t win the top spot because it comes close to mimicking that experience. It doesn’t. There isn’t anything about this pizza that actually resembles the gooey, melty, super-indulgent qualities of a New York slice — it’s not even made on a proper 18-inch pie. Dominos cut corners by only making this 16 inches, and tried to cover up the deception by cutting this pizza into six slices instead of the standard eight, tricking you into thinking each pie is more substantial than it actually is, because of course they did.
But failed geometry aside, it’s fucking delicious.
Yes, it still suffers from Domino’s lackluster pepperoni, but everything else about this pizza just works. Because the earthy tasting cornmeal-dusted crust is hand-stretched thinner here, it has an overall better balance between its crispy outer and chewy inner. I’m not sure if its thinner stretch helps it to char better in the oven, but it tastes more charred than Domino’s OG hand-tossed pie. The herb-heavy sauce is way more robust than what you’d find on an actual New York slice, giving this an overall heavy flavor that comes across a lot more savory and really works with the pepper-forward pepperoni.
The Breakdown:
Sauce: 4. If it was brighter and less complex it would be closer to what it’s trying to be. It’s a bit on the distracting side, but not in a bad way.
Crust: 5. The best crust at any national pizza chain hands down. More pizzas should be cornmeal-dusted.
Pepperoni: 3.5 if it was sliced a bit thinner it would crisp up better.
Total Score: 12.5
FINAL THOUGHTS:
12.5 for a delivery pie by a chain that services most of the country is incredible. Did you expect a 15 to be awarded? No chance. Head to Di Fara in Brooklyn. Or maybe to Naples or Bologna. But considering the circumstances, a 12.5 is freaking fantastic. If you’re ordering from a chain, this is most definitely the play and will earn you that MVP spot at the Super Bowl party.