The best pizza I have eaten in Bangalore is at my friend, Jay Bhow’s house. So when Jay, a VPN certified pizzaiolo, wondered if Bangalore was the artisanal pizza capital of India, we decided to go on a pizza crawl to find out. Over two days we dined at seven pizza restaurants. Our method was to try the Margherita at every outlet we visited – always a benchmark. We also ordered their signature pizza – a highlight of the establishment. Turned out that all the places we visited suggested vegetarian pizzas as one of their signature offerings. So even though there were non-vegetarians in our group of four, we ended up eating all vegetarian pizzas, often with wine. Below are some of our tasting notes.

Pizza 4Ps has been making waves in Bangalore for a while and with good reason. Their burrata salad pizza was brilliant – tart, creamy and crunchy. The crust, which sets a benchmark of “pass or fail” in artisanal pizza, was chewy with perfect bubbly air pockets in the rim. The bottom of the crust, had charred black “leopard spots,” giving the woody flavour. I found the Margherita’s crust to be slightly soggy but the toppings were layered with a restrained hand. Often Indian pizzas are over-laden with cheese because the clientele demands it. Not here. Good selection of local wine, though their glasses could be better.

23^rd Street Pizza gets a lot of things right. It serves New York style pizza (in which olive oil is mixed into the dough) with a medium, not thin crust. It is served on a pizza stand on an aluminium (not wood) platter, just like in New York. It even gets the checked paper below the pizza right. The Pick me Up pizza, their signature, was spicy and piquant. Their Margherita too was well-balanced. What pleased us was their wine list. Tightly curated and served in beautiful glasses, we enjoyed the white and red wines by the glass.

La Gioia is a new kid in town and needs to be marketed better. The staff and the chef are clearly passionate about pizza. When they learned that Jay was a pizzaiolo, they began comparing Italian products, tomatoes, and sauces. They have artifacts from Italy and interesting utensils, but the ambience inside could be livelier. The pizzas were made with mozzarella fior di latte, made from cow’s milk rather than buffalo. They do homemade pastas too—so worth a visit.

Trippy Goat with its café vibe, is not a pizza restaurant or even an Italian one, but it has a gas-fired pizza oven. It is here, when talking to the owner, that we learned about the compromises that pizza restaurants had to make for the Indian palate— adding extra cheese on the topping for one. Try the terrific mushroom pizza with truffle oil drizzled on top. They have a lot of interesting wines by the glass that go with pizza in Schott Zwiesel glasses.

Brik Oven was the original Bangalore pizzeria. It is arguably the most authentic, since it is completely wood fired, as opposed to most of the others here that are gas-fired. This gives the pizzas a nice smoky charred flavour. The tiny space on Church Street makes up for in food what it lacks in ambience. Try their mushroom and arugula one. On the pizza crawl, we had the perfectly good Margherita and a terrific Diavola with sliced baby eggplant, bird’s eye chili, sundried tomatoes and feta. They also have a terrific vegan list of pizzas and milkshakes

Spettacolore is a vegetarian Italian restaurant that does not serve alcohol. Choose the al fresco seating overlooking some trees. Order yourself a Diet Coke— goes great with pizza anyway. But this is a place that takes ingredients seriously, using Italian 00 flour—the standard and allowing the pizza dough to ferment for 40-50 hours. They make their mozzarella and other cheeses in-house. Besides Neapolitan, they also do a Canotto style pizza where the crust has a bigger rim, giving it a canoe-like effect with the toppings in the center.

Whenever I go to Lyfe in Whitefield, I try their Jay’s Special Bianco pizza, named after – who else – Jay Bhow. With red onion, parmesan, bocconcini, rosemary and almond flakes, it is a terrific change from the red sauce based pizzas available everywhere. This time, because we knew the chef-owner, Abhijit Saha, I tried making a pizza under Jay’s watchful eye. Making pizza is both easy and hard. The dough is forgiving but requires a firm touch, a muscle memory. You need to pat the dough—like bajra roti—and spread it evenly. I made a pesto topping and layered some colourful bell peppers—red, yellow and green on it. Had a hard time getting the slippery pizza on the long handle to shove it into the oven. All of which made me realise and respect the process of making pizza a whole lot more.

The book that seems to be the Bible for pizza bakers or pizziolas as they are called is Flour Water Salt Yeast, which teaches you the basics of how to make great pizza, yes, but also goes beyond to talk about bread. So read it and try your hand at this forgiving yet precise art of making pizza.