UPDATE: This contest is now closed; Pete's New Haven Apizza is the winner. You can now vote in either the Cafe Pizzaiolo vs. Duccini's Pizza face-off or the Comet Ping Pong vs. Piola contest.

Who makes the best pizza in Washington? You tell us! Today, voting begins on the first Washingtonian.com Pizza Pool, a brackets-style contest that will narrow 32 pizzas to one winner. For a refresher on how the brackets will work, head here. Or, go straight to today's first face-off below (we’ll post a second match-up later this afternoon).

• See the main Pizza Pool page
• See the Pizza Pool bracket

Pete’s New Haven Apizza: Co-owner Alicia Mehr hails from New Haven, a pizza Mecca. Although the coal-fired slabs at New Haven landmarks such as Sally’s and Pepe’s don’t quite jump to mind here—they’re thinner, smokier, more brittle—one pie in particular does its forebears justice. The New Haven, an homage to Pepe’s most famous pizza, is a sauceless 18-inch crust laden with chopped clams and pecorino cheese. It’s salty, briny, garlicky—and it stays beautifully crisp. Perhaps Pete’s greatest appeal is pizza by the slice—a rarity in Washington, apart from the after-hours grease bombs slung along Adams Morgans’ 18th Street. The ingredients are well chosen; seldom do you find such good sausage on a $2.75 slice.

Ledo Pizza: You don’t come to Tommy Marcos Ledo Restaurant (the original Ledo Pizza) to hear a waitress extol the virtues of ingredients plucked fresh from the farm or to sample such exotica as a softshell-crab pie. You come to chow on gloriously unfussy fare. The wood-paneled room is past its prime, but the pizza remains one of the area’s best. Rectangular, not circular, topped with gobs of smoked provolone and with a crust that calls to mind a thin pastry, this isn’t a pie for everyone, and pizza vets from New York, Philly, Jersey, or Chicago may look askance at it. Their loss.

Did you know? If you click the links of each of those restaurants' names, you can leave your own review of their pizza at that page! 

This poll will stay open until noon on Tuesday.
*To help keep this contest fair, we've elected to use an IP address-based poll. This means that if you are voting from an office or network setting, not everybody will be able to vote. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we hope you'll encourage coworkers to vote from their home computers.