Think of pizza. Easy enough, right? Everyone lands on some combination of crust, sauce and cheese — but where you grew up shapes what that picture actually looks like. Your pizza might be a floppy slice folded in half, a square cut into bite-sized pieces or something you eat with a fork and a napkin on standby.
Pizza isn’t one thing so much as a category that holds a lot of opinions. It stretches from soft, blistered Neapolitan pies to the unapologetically heavy Chicago deep dish that blurs the line between dinner and endurance sport. It includes the spare, almost austere tomato‑and‑bread slabs of Rhode Island bakeries and the thick, braided‑crust mountain pies of the Rockies, built for sharing…