Pizza in Pitt Meadows, Ranked

Let me get the awkward part out of the way first. As far as I can find, Pitt Meadows has two dedicated pizza places. Two. Ranking a field of two is faintly ridiculous, and any local list that stretches this category to ten entries is padding it out with grocery store freezers and restaurants that are not in this city at all.

So here is the short ranking, with the actual reasons, followed by the more useful conversation, which is what a household of ordinary people does with the other pizza nights in a town of nineteen thousand.

A note on how I am judging. In a city this size, a restaurant's shape tells you most of what you need to know before you order. Whether the kitchen has one job or several, whether it is built to feed a table or a person, whether it wants to sit you down: that is the axis these two sit on, and it is why they are not really competing for the same night.

1. Artista Pizzeria

A single-subject restaurant, and I take that seriously. There is nowhere to hide when the sign says pizzeria and nothing else. The whole enterprise rides on one thing coming out of one oven, so the pizza gets the attention that a broad menu would spread across fifteen dishes and a dessert list. This is the one I pick when the pizza itself is the point, when I want to eat it and think about it rather than just get it into the house before the kids revolt.

The narrow menu is also the reason it will not suit every night, which is the honest trade. Focus is a feature until somebody in your group has decided they are not eating pizza.

2. The Other Guys Pizza & Pasta

Which brings us here. Pizza and pasta on the same menu is not a hedge, it is a household solution. It means one order covers the table when opinions diverge, and one stop instead of two on the way home. Anyone who has tried to feed four people with four different positions on dinner understands why that is worth a place on this list on its own merits.

Second on the ranking, first on frequency, if I am being straight about it. The best restaurant and the most used restaurant are rarely the same restaurant, and pretending otherwise is how these lists lose credibility.

There is no third

I could pad this. I am not going to. Two dedicated pizza kitchens is what a city of nineteen thousand people supports, most of whose land is farmland inside the Agricultural Land Reserve and most of whose residents live in one compact strip in the south. The city's own retail study says what everybody here already knows, which is that most of our retail floor space sits out at Meadowtown and most of it belongs to national chains. Independent single-category restaurants are the harder business, and we have two of them doing pizza. That is a fact about the size of the town, not a complaint about the town.

What I actually do on the other nights

The real competition for a pizza night is not other pizza. It is everything else you can carry home in a box while nobody cooks.

• KrunChicken for when the craving is specifically fried and specifically not Italian. Same job, different night, and it breaks up a rotation that otherwise gets stale fast in a small town.
• Austin Fish & Chips for the older version of that same idea. Fish and chips is the original takeaway format and it still travels better than most things, which matters when home is a drive across the flats.
• The Jolly Coachman Pub for the nights when the actual problem is not dinner but the prospect of another evening at your own kitchen table. Sitting somewhere else with a drink in front of you solves a category of problem that no delivery order ever has.

What to drink with it

Pizza is one of the few foods that is genuinely improved by whatever is easiest to get, so this part is not complicated. Foamers' Folly Brewing Co. is the local answer and the one I would reach for if I were putting something in front of guests, on the reasonable grounds that beer brewed in the same city as the dinner is a nicer story than beer brewed anywhere else. Pitt Meadows Beer & Wine Store covers everything else, including the case where somebody wants wine with a pizza, which I have stopped arguing about.

The summary, then. Artista Pizzeria when the pizza matters. The Other Guys Pizza & Pasta when the table matters. And a rotation wide enough that neither of them has to carry every Friday night, because in a town this size, the fastest way to ruin a good restaurant is to go there every week until you are sick of it.