Daily dispatches on the Washington, DC area's food, restaurant and dining scene.

The Pizza Pool Winner!

Well, folks, our long adventure of pizza panic is over! After leaving the Pizza Pool final open for the past week, it's time to announce a winner: Flippin' Pizza has taken the title over RedRocks Pizzeria with 54 percent to 46 percent. Congrats to both of the finalists, and to all 32 of the excellent pizza spots that competed in this bracket.

We do want to address a few comments that have been brought up over the course of this competition. First, it is important to realize that the pizzerias that advanced in the brackets are not endorsed by The Washingtonian as being the best pizza in the area; instead, these are reader-selected spots.

Comments

Flippin’ Pizza are you serious? Maybe Domino’s will win next year!

Posted by: michael, Dec 29, 2009 02:24:08 PM

We really enjoyed the pizza brackets. We actually traveled to different neighborhoods and tried new pizza places. We look forward to trying other top bracket pizza establishments.

I liked the idea of Washingtonian having a panel of tasters separate from the popular vote. May offer a more legit ranking, if not an interesting comparison to the popular vote.

I hate the idea of a chain too but when they’ve got good pizza, they’ve got good pizza. Can’t exclude them.

Thanks for the fun!

Posted by: Sonya, Sep 14, 2009 08:57:16 AM

Please include Pupatella in the running next year!

Posted by: Evan, Sep 12, 2009 07:11:50 AM

Interesting suggestion, George. Thanks for weighing in!

Posted by: Emily at Washingtonian.com, Sep 11, 2009 07:08:10 AM

I think Washingtonian should have assembled a diverse team of tasters (5 people) in addition to the reader polls, and run that beside the popular vote. This group would have to eat at each place in all the head to heads before casting their votes. I’m assuming most voters just went for their favorite local place without trying the competition. Sure, I couldn’t get to all the places, but I only voted when I could go to both contenders. It would be interesting to see what a Washingtonian control group of tasters would have chosen as compared with the general public.

Posted by: George, Sep 11, 2009 06:54:23 AM

Great Fun! What’s next?

Posted by: 79pooh83, Sep 10, 2009 08:36:36 PM

@DB—actually, the Burger Brackets was 32 spots, just like the Pizza Pool! 32 seemed like a good amount to us, however, just because it was broad enough, but manageable. Thanks for your comments!

@Fairness, good points as well. We’ll take those ideas into consideration for sure.

Posted by: Catherine (washingtonian.com), Sep 10, 2009 12:15:55 PM

I’ve been trying to think of ideas that would make this sort of contest more fair. I mean, encouraging people to vote for you by offering free pizza is kind of ridiculous, especially when you’re a larger chain with plenty of resources at your disposal making that sort of thing easy. I don’t know if that sort of tactic could be banned, but it wouldn’t hurt to discourage offering people gifts for voting.

Would it be possible to enforce some sort of registration or email validation in order for a vote to be counted? This might depress total votes, but it might make the votes more accurate.

Just some thoughts.

Posted by: Fairness, Sep 10, 2009 11:38:12 AM

It’s a fun little game.

My only thoughts:

(1) Try to ensure you have a broad base of contenders for the tournament. The Burger Bracket was like 8 places. Really? And there are more than 32 pizza places in the DC Region. What about Z? Or Boli? Or Manny & Olga? i’ve nothing against Pizza Hut, frankly. Let them sink or swim.

(2) Votes from outside the region questions are sketchy, but... really the bigger question is whether there is a foundation to choose. If you haven’t eaten at both restaurants in the head-to-head, your vote doesn’t mean anything, right?

Posted by: DB, Sep 10, 2009 11:34:31 AM

@anonymous and Camille—thank you for your thoughtful suggestions. We’ll definitely take them into consideration.

Any other input from readers? We really do want to hear what you hated/loved/were indifferent to about this contest so we can make it, and ones like it, better in the future.

Posted by: Catherine (washingtonian.com), Sep 10, 2009 10:53:12 AM

I think this was a great contest. I think that, despite the ups and downs of each particular match-up, people will hold on to their respective opinions of what makes a great pizza. There is plenty of room in the market for different kinds of pizza.

I also think that the behavior on the comment boards of "fans" of the different places, and for that matter the contributions of employees and managers, reflects on those establishments, and they get the marketing dividends, up or down, from the comments. There were some truly distasteful comments late in the contest, including dirty language and anti-gay terms, that I think should be deleted from the comment board for posterity.

Hopefully next year, the contest will be just as fun and everyone involved will be able to gain from it.

Posted by: anonymous, Sep 10, 2009 10:39:30 AM

I think what was frustrating to a lot of people was that some unknown quantity of the votes in this contest were coming from outside the DC region. I think this was a pretty unique circumstance -- I don’t see a ton of chains with locations elsewhere advancing in other Washington-region food pools -- but perhaps you could make sure of it in the future. All you’d need to do is restrict the contenders to those that have all locations within x miles of D.C. That would rule out Flippin’ and Five Guys, for example, which would be somewhat lame, but at least it would remain a contest for Washington-area residents. Just a thought. You could also rule out chains completely, but that seems unnecessarily punitive toward a D.C.-area company that happens to have two locations.

Posted by: Camille, Sep 10, 2009 10:15:54 AM