The latest entrant in the upscale pizza wars: Pizza Pizza?

Trends probably shouldn’t cycle this quickly. Only four years after Pizzeria Libretto first opened its doors, setting off a thin-crust craze, Toronto is now awash in Neapolitan-style pizza, with opening after opening after opening (yes, Terroni was there first, and of course there were isolated other places serving the stuff around town). But now things are getting absurd: in a press release, Pizza Pizza just announced it’s launching its own line of thin-crust pizzas. The chain appears to be attempting to punch above its weight, promising them to be “as artisanal and gourmet as what you would find in a high-end dine-in pizza restaurant.” Twelve varieties of pizza have been rolled out, including a conventional Primavera and the somewhat out-there Sweet Chilli Thai, using ingredients that actually sound pretty good: cipolline onions, smoked provolone and roma tomatoes, to name a few. We keenly await the judgement of this city’s pizza-philes.