In the last few years, the Bay Area has entered a golden age of New York-style pizza — more than a dozen spots in the region now specialize in the hefty slices. As the ideal medium for pepperoni, they’ve reignited my love for the Italian American sausage and its salty, smoky, spicy splendor. Call me basic, but I’ll take pepperoni over hot honey or burrata any day.
With the influx of new options, I’ve wondered who makes the region’s supreme pepperoni slice. Pepperoni has two camps: wide coins with artificial casing, known to stay flat during the bake, and smaller cups with natural casing, which shrink and curl in the oven, also known as cup-and-char pepperoni. The latter is the obvious winner, with Ezzo pepperoni being the gold standard, for its tendency to furl like an inverted eye popper.
My ideal cups have some weight and chew, a hint of char around the edges and slight smokiness, but not too much — it shouldn’t taste like smoked ham. To find my red darling, I ate slices at more than 20 New York-style shops, from recent entrants like Che Fico Pizzeria in San Francisco, where crusts are oiled and frosted with cheese, to the classics like A Slice of New York in San Jose, which serves its triangles with few frills…