Best Pizza?

To the reader who asked about pizzas, I thought we'd had an open thread on best pizzas in Indy but I couldn't find it in a quick search. Certainly, the topic has come up time and time again. Feel free to chime in on who you think is the best. I can't reveal any results from the Dine judging, but I can say this -- after tasting 53 entries:

1) If you're going to be innovative with pizza (salad on pizza, smoked fish, strange sauces, non-standard crust), you'd better knock it out of the park. Also, do some research because what you may think is "gourmet" pizza may be just a really bad idea. And we definitely tasted some bad ideas yesterday.

2) Crust is everything. Really, restaurant supply rolled out dough? Undercooked? Come on.

3) I'm so over whole basil leaves. They look unappealing after they've been smothered in cheese and baked. And you know that heat changes the taste, right?

4) Mustard has no place on pizza. Especially not honey mustard.

5) We taste blind and were hoping for some hidden finds, but after we were finished, none of us really could be surprised when a few known names popped up as the best. Of course, a couple of known names aren't doing such a great job, either.

6) People, this is a competition! Why do you send oversalted, burned, or poorly constructed dishes to the judges?! Every time we get these entries, I'm mystified. Then depressed.

But if we learned anything in considering pizza to such a detailed degree -- from the yeast content in the crust to the quality of the cheese -- one thing was clear: Pizza is a complete dish, not complete in the nutritional sense, but complete in that it should taste great as one integrated bite of crust, toppings, sauce and cheese. Whether weird or not, traditional or new age, the pizzas that did well delivered on this promise. And to be fair, we tasted some good pies.