3142: (City)-Style Pizza

2025-09-24T20:06:46Z

AuroraVeil: Added a more distinguishing description of Chicago and New York-style pizzas. It's my first edit so feel free to revise! :]

:''The correct title of this article is '''''3142: <City>-Style Pizza'''''. It appears incorrectly here due to {{w|Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions)|technical restrictions}}.''
{{comic
| number = 3142
| date = September 15, 2025
| title = <City>-Style Pizza
| image = city_style_pizza_2x.png
| imagesize = 480x314px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = If you want to see true audacity, do an image search for 'Altoona-style pizza.'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Copypasted from talk:

The current description for New York and Chicago style pizza just sounds like a description of pizza in general, aside from the specific crust thickness. "topped with tomato sauce, followed by various toppings, then topped with mozzarella cheese" that's just a normal pizza, and "various toppings" is so vague that again, almost any pizza qualifies. Never heard people describing the simplest and most common pizza type there is as being a New York style in particular, are there really no other distinct characteristics to it?}}{{w|Pizza}} is one of the most popular foods in the United States and a number of major cities have {{w|Pizza_in_the_United_States#Variations|regional variations on pizza}}, which have come to be named after the city. {{w|New York–style pizza}} and {{w|Chicago-style pizza}} are two of the most well known. New York-style pizza is characterized by a distinctly thin, wide, and flexible crust. Slices are incredibly wide, and flexible enough to typically be eaten folded. Chicago-style pizza is cooked in a deep dish, from which it gets its namesake, with a very thick crust. Unlike many other pizza styles, Chicago-style pizza has chunky tomato sauce over a large amount of cheese, rather than having the cheese on top.

This comic contains a chart that compares the tastiness of pizza styles with the size of the city in the name. They generally span a broad range, and the upper limit tends to be pretty consistent, suggesting that cities of all sizes can produce good pizza. The smallest cities are shown as having the least possibility for a good pizza named after them. (The apex is shown as being for mid-sized cities toward the smaller end of the spectrum, but no explanation is given for this — possibly [[Randall]] may have a particular favorite from a mid-sized city.)

The lower end of the range shows much more variation. The largest cities are shown as being incapable of having bad pizza as their speciality, with the worst examples still being okay. The smaller the cities are, the more potential there is for a bad pizza to qualify for the name. This may be due to the fact that large cities tend to have many restaurants. As a result, there is more chance of one of them producing a decent variant, and more competition for which one will become synonymous with the city. Smaller cities with fewer eating options might accept lower quality choices because they lack options.

At the lowest end of the range are very small cities with terrible regional pizza. The caption jokes that this is to due to "bored restaurant owners" deliberately making up bad pizza varieties as a "fun prank" on visitors. The implication is that some local pizza styles are so bad that they could only have been created as a joke, and even the people who created them don't think they're appealing.

New York-style pizza is indicated at the top of the city size axis (New York City being the largest city in the US), and near the top of the tastiness axis, but in the middle of the range of cities of its size. New York City is where pizza was first popularized in the US, having been brought by Italian immigrants in the 19th century. The style from New York has been highly influential over pizza throughout the country, and is generally acknowledged to be appealing to most people.
[[File:2023 Altoona Pizza from Dino’s.jpg|thumb|upright=0.7|An {{w|Altoona-style pizza}}.]]
The title text gives a specific example of a terrible pizza from a small city, describing {{w|Altoona-style pizza}} as "true audacity". Created in the Altoona Hotel in {{w|Altoona, Pennsylvania}}, it has a thick square of bread-like Sicilian-style crust, covered with tomato sauce, bell peppers, and salami and a slice of American cheese. Not only does Randall implicitly find this to be highly unappetizing, but considers it audacious to even call it pizza. The structure of this dish is very odd for pizza (looking more like an open-faced sandwich), the toppings are eccentric, and the use of American cheese to top pizza is so strange as to border on culinary heresy. This is presumably the type of "pizza" that Randall believes could only be created as a joke.

==Transcript==
:[A graph.]
:[The x and y axes have no unit markings, and are labeled:]
::[X axis: City size]
::[Y axis: Tastiness of "<city>-style pizza"]

:[A shaded region is bounded by a lower bound and an upper bound. The upper bound has a slight peak corresponding to a smallish city, but is otherwise mostly flat. The lower bound appears on the X axis close to the left, evens out to being almost flat in the middle, and rises toward the right.]

:[An arrow points to the right end of the shaded area, with the label:]
::New York up here somewhere

:[A label is in the middle of the shaded region at a medium X value. Many arrows point outward from the text, which reads:]
::various controversial regional specialties

:[An arrow points to the region with a low x and y-value, where the line for the lower bound is missing. This region is labeled:]
::towns with bored restaurant owners who have come up with a fun prank to play on visitors

==Trivia==

A remarkable spike in [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11nmt6q5kp Google searches for "Altoona-style pizza"] was observed at the publication date of this comic.

The original comic's title invokes an encoding error in terms of HTML rendering, and it was copied to this wiki page. It reads "<City>-Style Pizza", which can be interpreted by web browsers and scrapers as containing an HTML tag for a "City" element for some unknown semantic/formatting effect. Being not {{w|Document type definition|defined}} or implemented, this 'tag' ends up being ignored and the remaining content is rendered as just "-Style Pizza". It is not the [[3015: D&D Combinatorics|first]] [[3028: D&D Roll|time]] that Randall has accidentally clashed with HTML-rendering issues. The "<" and ">" signs are not supported on [[explain xkcd|this wiki]] and other wikis due to {{w|Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions)|a technical restriction on page titles}}, so the wiki's pagename for this comic's explanation doesn't precisely match the official title.

{{comic discussion}}<noinclude>
[[Category: Food]]
[[Category: Charts]]

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3142: (City)-Style Pizza