Berlin does not have a pizza problem. Berlin has, by now, rather the opposite problem: there is a hell of a lot of good pizza.

A few years ago a wood-fired oven from Naples, some fior di latte and a crust with leopard spotting were enough to make half a district nervous. Today there is biga, sourdough, house-developed vegan mozzarella, yellow tomato sauce and pizza built on the New York model. Somebody probably already keeps a spreadsheet on dough fermentation.

The good news: you no longer have to decide whether Berlin can do good pizza. The more interesting question is which one you want right now.

These five are, for us, right at the top.

Gazzo – sourdough before sourdough was everywhere

There are restaurants that jump on a trend. And there are restaurants where you eventually forget they had quite a lot to do with that trend in the first place.

Gazzo belongs to the second group.

Sourdough pizza got attention here before roughly every second ingredient in Berlin had to ferment for at least 48 hours. The dough gets several days, the flour is organic, and many ingredients come from smaller producers in the region. What comes out is not a classic Neapolitan pizza with a maximally inflated crust, but something more its own: airy, faintly sour and surprisingly easy to eat.

Which is exactly why you should not leave the crust behind here. Anyone who habitually leaves a graveyard of cornicione on the plate is ignoring about half the work at Gazzo.

At least as important is the ending: soft serve made from Brandenburg buffalo milk with olive oil and Maldon salt. Sounds at first like something invented at night after three natural wines. It works, though.

The pick: whatever pizza is on the daily menu, a starter to share, and the buffalo-milk soft serve after.

GEMELLO – vegan pizza with no apology

For a long time vegan pizza ran on a fairly sad deal: you get pizza, and in return you accept that something is missing.

At GEMELLO nothing is missing. At least nobody here cooks as though somebody needed compensating.

The place on Helmholtzplatz is entirely vegan and makes remarkably little theatre of it. The dough is built on a biga pre-ferment, and the toppings go considerably further than tomato sauce plus vegan substitute cheese: purple sweet potato, black olive as a base, house-made mozzarella from tapioca, or an anchovy alternative made from aubergine and seaweed.

That can start to sound like concept cooking. In places it is. What matters is that underneath the whole firework of ideas there is still a very good pizza.

And when the menu gets so experimental that you briefly cannot tell whether you are ordering dinner or a fermentation workshop, there is the Rosina. The quieter choice.

The pick: Pizza Rosina. After that you may work your way through the wilder things.

The Grain – where the dough stands on its own

At The Grain you should run a small test: tear off a piece of the crust and eat it first with nothing on it.

No chilli oil. No stracciatella. No sauce.

Just dough.

It sounds like the culinary version of a personality test, but it explains fairly quickly why this place is on the list.

The Grain builds its contemporary pizza on a biga pre-ferment. The cornicione rises hard while staying light and structured, and the base in the middle stays very thin. The one that sticks is the Marinara Gialla: yellow tomato, stracciatella, basil and anchovy.

Yellow tomato sauce is, incidentally, exactly the kind of detail that can make restaurants start taking themselves enormously seriously.

Here it makes sense.

The pick: Marinara Gialla. If you want more push, take the Diavola on the yellow base.

Slice Society – New York, without the twelve-hour flight

Not every good pizza needs a hand-built oven, three varieties of San Marzano tomato and a pizzaiolo whose grandfather was already kneading dough in 1957.

Sometimes you just need a slice of pepperoni pizza.

Slice Society does exactly that.

On Torstraße there is NY-style pizza by the slice: thin, crisp, foldable and handed straight over the counter. The pepperoni is the obvious order: house-spiced salami, tomato sauce, parmigiano and — if you make sensible decisions — hot honey on top.

It is greasy, sweet, salty and slightly hot.

Which is to say, pretty much the opposite of a plate where somebody has used tweezers to place three flowers on a smear of cream.

And sometimes that is exactly what is needed.

The pick: pepperoni slice with hot honey. No lengthy discussion.

W Pizza – uncomplicated is a concept too

With pizza there are two options by now.

You can spend twelve minutes on hydration, fermentation and the exact origin of a tomato.

Or you can sit down and eat a good pizza.

W Pizza is more the second variety.

The second branch of the pizzeria that originally started in Neukölln has been on Invalidenstraße since 2022. Big windows, heavy marble tables, self-service. You collect the pizza at the counter yourself. Nobody explains the philosophy of the flour to you first.

The pizza itself leans clearly Neapolitan: broad, airy crust, thin middle. It gets more interesting with the toppings. The version with lemon-zest pesto in particular stands out from the usual margherita-diavola programme and brings just enough acidity and freshness that the whole thing does not consist of cheese and good intentions by the halfway point.

There is natural wine from the Caminito next door to go with it. You can. You do not have to. The pizza works without orange wine and a detailed account of its barnyard note.

The pick: the pizza with lemon-zest pesto.