* note to self

Otto Piene – Berlin 1984 (für die Eröffnung der Ausstellung “Die Zukunft der Metropolen: Paris – London – Berlin”, Ernst-Reuter-Platz, Berlin, 1984) Foto: Otto Piene Archiv / ZERO foundation

Germany isn’t known for its pizza. I knew this much when I landed in Berlin but I’m a stubborn dude so of course the nine-day visit brought me to more pizzerias than the average Berliner visits in a lifetime. After all, I was only in town because of a pizza box art exhibition I was curating for a Berlin-based online food ordering company. Eating pizza was the least I could do to cover all my bases for this being a business trip (seriously, IRS, it was). 

Here’s a breakdown of the ten pizzerias I visited while in Berlin. Most were part of an epic pizza crawl I participated in along with Steph Mantis and my new homeslice/ Berlin pizza blogger Greg. Others were part of a mini-crawl with my buddy Zac, who I met because he was part of a week-long meditation / starvation retreat with my downstairs neighbor in Brooklyn. FOR REAL!

I’ll show you a photo, then I’ll give a recap of that pizzeria…

Gasthaus Figi Urbanstraße 47

This is a very cool place with clean decor and a warm vibe. The staff wasn’t too happy that we ordered just two pizzas and tap water, but we were out of their hair pretty quickly so no real harm done. Topping combinations are uncommon, but nothing revolutionary. One pizza we tried had chunks of pumpkin. The crust was pretty decent but only when measured against the other pizzas I tried in Berlin. Ouch. 

Il Casolare Grimmstr. 30 

Pretty cool place with Italians in the kitchen and punk rock posters on the yellow patina-tinted walls. The pizza was extremely salty with a lackluster crust. There wasn’t much going on with this pizza to make me come back, but our resident Berlin pizza spirit guide Greg said he’d had much better pizza there recently and one look at his blog supports his claim. The one saving grace is that they offer horse meat as a topping!