The 2015 Pizza Cup: How We'll Crown Beijing's Best Pizza

With the Pizza Cup Launch Party less than a week away, time has come for us to explain the inner workings of how we’ll elect the winner of the 2015 Pizza Cup. Your participation is critical, so read on!

We’re sticklers for fairness and we’re also constantly in pursuit of the best, so we’ve carefully constructed a time-tested process to unearth the city’s best pizzas.

Phase I: Lay the Groundwork
We started with a master list of 274 known or rumored pizza-serving establishments in Beijing from our own archives and online sources. We then attempted to contact each one to verify their existence. This led us to discover that already over 100 of them had bitten the dust, never existed to begin with, or have removed pizzas from their menus. After deleting these from our records, we were left with 162 existing pizza-serving restaurants, operating a total of around 600 outlets across the city.

Phase II: Inform
We then began the process of informing you about as many of these placed as we can. Some are already known quantities to our readership; others are complete unknowns. The process is already underway with our two pizza-themed blog series:

Pizza My Mind asks people from all walks of life to recommend their favorite pizzas. Since we know pizza comes in all shapes and sizes, we asked people not to choose one generic “favorite” but rather their favorites under three of 10 different self-selected scenarios – for instance, when looking for a great deal, or when taking the kids out for a meal, or when going out on a date.

Pizza Profiles takes a closer look at individual pizza restaurants, asking them about their particular styles of pizza and also analyzing their “standard” pizza (a simple cheese or Margherita) as well as one of their most special creations.

Phase III: Encourage you to Sample via the Pizza Fest
This is where we ask the voters of Beijing to come out and try pizzas of all sorts. This year it’s a two-day affair, and at last count we have 17 of Beijing’s best pizza merchants coming out to feed you. We’ve asked the merchants to keep prices moderate and to serve by the slice to give you an opportunity to try several different pies. We’ll have entertainment throughout both days.

Phase IV: Continue Your Explorations via Pizza Week
The week following the Pizza Fest is for you to continue your culinary exploration of what the city has to offer; we’ve asked every pizza place we’ve contacted -- including those who were unable to attend the Pizza Fest -- to offer a special deal for that week so you can try even more before you make your choices for your favorites.

Phase V Seed the Competitors
While Pizza Week is going on, we will gather the opinions of a panel of 200 Beijingers – 100 from a list of foodies we maintain, and 100 randomly selected from the list of previous voters – and ask them to pre-seed the contestants for this year’s match. These will then be used to determine the 64 – less than 40% of the existing venues -- that make it into the competition bracket.

We’ll also ask our seeding group to determine which of four subcategories the competitor belongs in:

-- Pizza Specialists: These are restaurants whose primary reason for existence is their pizzas.
-- Mid-range Italian Restaurants: These are the family-style and mid-range Italian restaurants that have pizzas as a central portion of their menu.
-- Bar/Pub Pizzas: These are the bars and pubs of the city that serve pizza alongside their drinks.
-- High-End Fine Dining Establishments: These are the fancier fine-dining Italian restaurants that have pizzas as a central portion of their menu.

We then insert these seedings alongside last year’s final rankings to develop a 64-contestant, NCAA Basketball March Madness-style bracket

Sixteen of the top vote-getters in each of the subcategories make the tourney, and the seedings are such that the top seeds are segregated out from eliminating one another until the later rounds.

Phase VI: Vote for Your Favorites
In the final phase, we open the voting to you, the masses, to choose your favorites in six rounds of voting until there is but one champion left.

Each round we pit one pizza place vs the other, and at the conclusion of each we carefully screen all votes for patterns of ballot stuffing or fraud, then declare a winner.

When all the rounds are done, we are left with the establishment that can rightfully claim the crown of the best pizza in Beijing. Stay tuned to thebeijinger.com to follow along.

Images: The Beijinger