TulaneLSU's top 10 pizzas of Mississippi

Friends,

Over the last year, Cousin and I have made multiple trips throughout the surprisingly large and dispersed state of Mississippi. As some of you know, the family compound is in Mississippi, so we make a few trips there, especially in the summer. We tried 65 pizzerias in total. It was a painful exercise because pizza in Mississippi is, like much else produced by the state, inferior compared to the rest of the nation.

Arguably, Mississippi’s primary pizza problem is using extremely moist dough with no proof time. There must be a secret how to make Mississippi pizza cookbook out there that has led to some of the worst doughs in America. It was not an isolated incident. Over 70% of the pizzas we tried suffered from a dough so puffy that if the pizza makers made it just a few inches thicker you could sleep on it.. The average Mississippi dough is also extra sweet, like the scourge of sweetened tea Cane’s brought to New Orleans 15 years ago. These same pizzerias have a tendency to cover up that mushy dough with an excessive amount of cheap cheese, resulting in a doughy, sweet, extremely greasy, and ultimately terrible pizza.

Over that course of pizza sampling, my average Mississippi pizza received a 2.89. It was not easy to go about this task. Even more difficult was writing a compelling and coherent history of pizza in Mississippi. I tried, but ultimately, there does not seem to be an arc to the Mississippi pizza story nor a direction forward. I gathered that some time in the 50s, a Biloxi Italian restaurant began serving pizza. Someone there thought it would be a good idea to put French dressing on it – it must have been really bad. There is an effort along the coast to bring back this condiment and even classify it as a distinct pizza – Biloxi style pizza, as though adding a clashing salad dressing to a pizza qualifies a city for having a distinct style.

Most older Mississippians with whom we broke pizza bread told us their first memories of pizza were in a Pasquales. This chain, whose origin was Cincinnati, became one of the first national pizza franchises and spread quickly in the South and Midwest. At one point there were more than ten Pasquales dotting Mississippi. Today, there remain only two – one in Laurel and one in Greenville. The style is thin and sweet. Pasquales ruled Mississippi during the 60s and 70s. Then came the bigger chains, like Pizza Hut and Domino’s in the 80s. Most of the pizzas we tried reminded us of the original Pizza Hut pan pizzas, although the sauces in contemporary Mississippi use much more sweet than the acidic sauce of Pizza Hut.

There are three very good pizzerias in Mississippi today, perhaps a harbinger of brighter pizza days ahead. Each serves a Neapolitan style and all are in the northern third of the state. I hope that either the northern Neapolitan movement drifts southward, bringing the doughy Mississippi style to its knees, as when Grant invested Vicksburg in a siege. The other possibility is that the gourmet New York style sweeping over New Orleans spreads to the Mississippi Gulf Coast before moving northward. I see this as less likely, as Mississippi pizza eaters will rarely be willing to pay $5 for a slice, a slice that many will think does not have enough cheese.

It is a deep regret that my professional camera, along with three memory cards holding over 15,000 of my most cherished recent memories, were stolen a few weeks ago. The only photos that I have been able to recover are the random few I took with my camera phone, whose quality pales in comparison.

TulaneLSU’s top 10 pizzas of Mississippi


10. Pizza Shack, Jackson and suburbs 4.22
What Tower of Pizza is to New Orleans pizza, Pizza Shack is to Mississippi pizza. It is the quintessential puffy, pillowy pizza dough. The cheese and sauce are reminiscent of Pizza Hut pizza. Jacksonians rave about Pizza Shack, and there are now three locations. We tried the one next to Mississippi College. The interior was quite odd – I think it had been a bank at some point and the tables had pennies covering them. The staff were welcoming, in the same way that Southern Baptists welcome visitors to their church for the first time. It was a bit overbearing and I was glad when we left.






9. Mario’s, Hattiesburg 4.79
Mario’s is tucked away in a depressing corner just off the interstate that requires you to drive over a road that appears to become a sidewalk at one point. The inside is depressing and sticky. The dough is most similar to the yeast rolls of Ryan’s Steakhouse fame – stretchy and sugary. I thought their garlicky breadsticks, which came out first and had the appearance of bagels, was better than the pizza.






8. Sal & Mookie’s, Jackson 4.87
When I read the menu and saw that they used Grande mozzarella, my hopes rose inside this contemporary and hip pizzeria that doubles, like many Brooklyn pizzerias, as an ice cream shop. Even though it is a complex that feels completely out of place in Jackson, i.e., clean and nice, my pizza hopes were not met, as the doughy Mississippi DNA once again was expressed in this example. The dough was undercooked, the sauce was tasteless, and the box was folded inside out.








7. Amore Italian Restaurant, Meridian 5.24
Housed in a Southern-Victorian style work of art near downtown, Amore is a better Italian restaurant than pizzeria, but it still has slightly above average pizza, which is a real rarity in Mississippi. It was the pizza that broke a streak of cottony textured dough that was over ten long.