For years, California suffered from a reputation as a pizza desert. Having grown up in an East Coast family with roots in Naples, I was keenly aware of the deficit when I moved here. “It was just different out here. We still had great pizza,” says Tony Gemignani, the world pizza champion who grew up in Fremont. “But you had to really know where to find it. It wasn’t on every corner.”
The Bay Area has since shed its reputation as a pizza backwater. Gemignani helped establish it as one of the craft’s leading outposts when he became the first American to win the World Pizza Cup crown in Naples, Italy. He has won 13 world pizza titles and been called the Michael Jordan of dough tossing.
