Pagliacci Pizza

Perennial winner of Seattle Weekly‘s readers’ poll for Best Pizza, Pagliacci has dominated the local pizza landscape for so long that we tend to take the company for granted, even when it dutifully rolls out its round of seasonal Primo pies. This spring, for the first time in four years, the company is fielding a new Primo, and it’s a killer: If you order only one pizza between now and the first week of March, be sure it’s the Salumi Salami Primo. The meat comes from Armandino Batali’s legendary Pioneer Square sausage shop, and it’s complemented by chopped sweet-hot red peppers from Howard Lev’s nearly-as-legendary Mama Lil’s; the two main flavor components are bound together by a layer of roasted fresh fennel that lends an indefinable sweetness to the mix. Even the crust seems reinvented: thinner, crispier, munchier. Despite the premium artisanal toppings, the pie costs no more than other Pagliacci standards ($15.99 for an 11-inch pizza, $18.99 for a 13-incher, and $20.99 for the bonanza 17-incher) and is available by delivery (206-726-1717, 425-453-1717 on the Eastside) and at all six walk-in stores.