Matador’s Tom Gates has eaten pizza on five continents in 2009. These are his picks for the worst in the world.
Pronto Pizza – La Serena, Chile
This creator of this restaurant should be thrown in jail. You’re looking at a picture of what should be called The Hawaiian Bastard.
It arrived half-cooked. I had to dig through a thicket of shredded ham, pineapple and –yes – cherries before finding a bite that seemed reasonable.
Imagine if candy was made out of ham. No, don’t imagine it as delicious. Imagine it as foul! That’s what this pizza tasted like. With additional pieces of uncooked, shredded, part-skim mozzarella.
Oh, and let’s discuss the concept of cherries on pizza: No. End of discussion.
Buenos Aires, Argentina
For the most part, don’t even bother with pizza in Buenos Aires. It’s about the most disgusting thing ever cooked in a country full of things that are perfectly cooked. Get thee to a meatery and skip this nonsense.
Don’t believe me? Witness big goops of cheese that taste like year-old butter. Add Oregano to cover the sweating fromage, which overpowers any hope for a cohesive taste. Toss on green olives the size of human testicles, just to make the whole thing seem even less palatable than…testicles.
The cheese is the problem here – somehow the Argentines know what to do with the meaty part of the cow but they have no idea what to do with the milky part. It sweats as if masturbating, defending a pie of oozy things that can’t be wiped up with a paper towel (it adheres to the slop and only makes it worse).
If you must eat a pizza in Buenos Aires, I highly recommend that you eat out. Anything delivered will arrive on one side of the box, looking more like a swollen eye than a pizza pie.
San Marco S.R.L., Piazza San Marco, Florence, Italy
It’s one of those In Theory pizzas, kind of like the crazy-combo pies that chains launch and pull before the coupon hits your mailbox. Yes, this is a French Fry Pizza.
What it amounts to is a pile of potatoes cooked in greasy cheese and pizza dough. It doesn’t work – not in the least. I watched another tourist give it a go and she couldn’t figure it out either. She squiggled a little ketcup onto her piece, took a bite, then threw it in the garbage. I assume that she pointed her hunger towards McDonalds shortly thereafter.
Please, put this miserable, suffering beast of a pizza down.
Suba Galaxy Hotel, Mumbai, India
A foul, atrocious pizza awaits anyone staying at The Suba Galaxy.
I broke budget in order to stay in a soundproofed room that blocked out Mumbai’s consistent howl. My stomach growled for something familiar and eventually I gave into the most primal of urges: Room Servive. The tray arrived, the lid came off and I could have cried. This was not my beautiful house. This was not my beautiful wife.
I implore you. DO NOT EVER put onions inside of a pizza, especially ripe and uncooked offenders. I’d also like to suggest that feta doesn’t work in this context and that mystery greens are not generally acceptable in any form.
This pizza was devious, deceptive and evil.
Italian Pizza, Lonely Beach, Koh Chang, Thailand
You’re thinking that it doesn’t look too bad, this one. This is only because you’ve seen the above pizza pictures. It’s relative, sir/mam. Look at it again. It’s awful!
The first thing that most Thai pizza-makers do is start with a pre-made base, kind of like you’d find in aisle six of Stop & Shop. Many times, they’ll take just about any kind of jarred tomato sauce (I’ve seen Ragu) and add it to cheese that tastes a bit of dirty socks and coriander. The pizza pictured is a fine example.
Yes – It serves us Falang tourists right for ordering pizza in Thailand. Yes – we should know better and just order the Pad Thai like every other backpacker. But no, we can’t resist the promise of a real pizza.
It’s the ladyboy of the food world – we know it’s not real but by-gosh, we’re going in anyway.
We want to hear your pizza nightmares! Feel free to comment below and PLEASE link to a picture, if you have one.
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78 Comments... join the discussion!
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Hi Tom,
Great job, I especially liked the mystery greens pizza. Man, it looks like it could star in a horror film. I pity your nights with such perpertrators!
Stay strong,
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Central Madagascar…from what I could tell from my almost non-existent French the cafe in Ambalavo offered Vegetarian Pizza. Okay sounds good. Tomatoes, green peppers, mushrooms and the like. If I could have read what kind of veggies I would have stuck with a Zebu steak and pommes frit. Came with carrots, green beans, two kinds of squash on an underdone crust with a thin layer of watery tomato sauce. I took the veggies off their sad, doughy base, mixed in the cheese and came up with an vegetarian au gratin casserole. Edible at least. First and last pizza I ordered in Mada.
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I was served a pizza in Nagoya, Japan. The crust was incredibly undercooked, doughy and far too sweet. There was some bland cheese, and the whole thing was slathered in mayonnaise. It was topped with awful pink sausage, smoked seafood, and a softly poached egg. And you had to eat it with your hands or with chopsticks. An undercooked, mayo-laden lump of dough with egg yolk running everywhere.
My hosts took me there because they thought I’d like to have western food. When I go to Japan, I more or less want to bathe in noodles and rice and sushi.
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My worst pizza was in Portugal. Baccalau (dried salted cod) pizza with at least 2 inches of cheese.
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1) You are simply an imbecile who doesn’t really know to enjoy different flavors other than a plain and boring salami pizza. WTF have you ever seen that the pizzerias in NY are offering as toppings? Broccoli? are you freaking serious? And that is not just an isolated Hispanic pizzeria lost in the middle of a ghetto, it is a topping you will find in any pizzeria in NYC. And you are telling me that these other countries are worse than that? Gimme a fucking break.
2) Your partiality in reviewing a single restaurant as the representation of a whole continent made me puke. Literally. Now my keyboard is all sticky because of you.
3) The originality of the Argentinean pizzas are superb and much more flavorful than the plain shit you get in the US. Of course that some restaurants are going to be low quality if you are cheap. Where the hell did you get the masturbated pizza? If you are a cheap bastard, that is what you get, and seems that you kept getting shit in every country you visited for being a cheap bastard.↵ -
If nothing else, this article has been worthwhile because it has allowed me to officially become a moron. Previously, it had been quite unofficial. I’m wondering in which province, country or state you have bestowed this proclamation, or if it is a worldwide honor?
You’re a real peach – a ray of sunshine on an otherwise humdrum day. Thanks for sharing your eloquence with the world.
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Agreed, you are looking FAR too generally at the tastes of a nation. I’m living in Buenos Aires, and I’ve had a lot of pizza. While in general it pales in comparison to good U.S. cuisine (the olives really are a pain, but just because they are unpitted; how are you supposed to take a big ol’ bite when you’re worried about cracking a tooth?), it’s not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. They could do with less cheese and more tomato sauce, but that’s the way the culture likes their food.
Also, go to Guerrin on Corrientes near El Centro and you can experience some of the best pizza not just in the country but anywhere.
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My worst pizza would have to be Palestinian pizza in Nablus, West Bank. Absolutely atrocious. Dry, no sauce, and extremely salty. And when I say extremely salty, I mean EXTREMELY salty. I’ve had it on two separate occasions, from two different places, once in 2005 and once in 2008. Same thing both times. Horrible.
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Almost everything served as “pizza” in Ireland before 1990 was pretty offensive.
But hands down the worst pizza I ever had was in Watamu, Kenya. Still, I wolfed it down. As a veggie, I was just happy to find cheese! Cooked cheese!↵ -
The pizza in South East Asia is generally really nasty… the cheese is weird and the sauce is too sweet. I’ll stick to tofu and veggies thanks
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Scott, I’m with you in the cultural differences: I’m from Argentina but live in Dallas and I can’t stomach the pizza they make there, it’s got too much sweet sauce for my taste. And I definitely agreed with you on the olives, why on earth they don;t pit them first is beyond me!
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I’ve had so many bad ones in Pakistan it would be hard to name the worst….
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hi!! im from argentina, and i dont know a lot of english, but i can undersatand u. The true is i have eat a lot of pizzas and the best is always the pizza Argentina!! Is really “sabroso”, i love it… i have eat the american pizza… thats really horrible!! if u want to go out and eat some pizza in bs. as. i can say the true: its delicius… ^^ thank u!!
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Hilarious and absolutely right about pizzas in Buenos Aires. There are a couple of places that do decent pizzas (though they will typically have unpitted olives… which never has bothered me). Piola (a Brazilian chain) is probably the best and Sr. Telmo is pretty good, too. Funny that Argentines really think they have great pizza. Nasty cheese, sweet tomato sauce, and unimaginative toppings.
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