All About Food:

The story goes that in Naples about 1889, Queen Margherita took an inspection tour of her Italian kingdom and saw many people, especially peasants, eating this large flatbread. Curious, she ordered her guards to obtain one for her and she fell in love with it. She would eat it every time she was out among the people, which caused some consternation in court circles for it was not seemly for a queen to dine on peasant’s food.

Nevertheless, she summoned Rafaelle Esposito from his pizzeria to the royal palace to bake a selection of these delicious doughy treats. He invented a special one for her topped with tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and fresh basil, which represented the colors of the Italian flag (red, white and green). It instantly became her favorite and started a culinary tradition, the pizza Margherita, which lasts to this very day in Naples and has spread around the world.

About this time, the idea of baking the pizza in special brick ovens also came into existence and variations in the toppings began to appear in different parts of the country; for example, the Bolognese added meat.

It wasn’t until after World War II that this marvelous manna became popular in United States and Western Europe. Soldiers occupying Italian territories tasted it for the first time and were hooked. They came home to seek out the unfamiliar Italian neighborhoods that had been preparing this saucy delight for generations.

Pizza today, especially since the advent of Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck in 1982, is as varied as there are ingredients to top it, ranging from Puck’s smoked salmon pizza with crème fraiche to Canadian bacon and pineapple.

Laguna offers a variety of styles from traditional Neapolitan (New York style), Chicago deep dish, gourmet flatbread, thin crust, whole-grain crust and gluten-free crust. Toppings abound.

Romeo Cucina has the most authentically Italian pizza in town with a real wood-burning brick oven. They serve a classic Margherita that the queen would surely love and a meat-loaded pizza with pepperoni, salami and sausage called al gusto forte. On the other hand, keeping up with contemporary trends, they have a vegetarian with a mélange of vegetables (and mozzarella on request) and a pollo orientale with grilled chicken, tomato mozzarella and teriyaki sauce.