Goat cheese! Honey! Gorgonzola! Monkey splooge! Stop this madness.
Mozzerella and not the weird yellow pretend mozzarella. Normally I liked pretend cheese because I'm sophisticated like that, but on a pizza it has to be the real stuff. I tell you, if you get the base right, the toppings should be minimal. But it has to hammock. I've been given pizza that stands out like a rigid triangle of cardboard, some kind of obscene doughy, tomato sauce-dribbling erection. No, no. no.
Or the one I got served the other week, with giant crusts terrorising the puddle of toppings in the middle. Why on earth would I want a handful of dry, chewy bread unadorned with any kind of sauce or topping? I don't care if it's artisanal sourdough, who wants to sitting there chewing through what was practically an entire dry loaf. It's a pizza base. It has just one job and that's to deliver toppings to my mouth. I'm not there to eat a loaf.
The best pizza I had was a in little Italian-American place on Narragansett Bay, Little Rhodie. Thin hammocky slices of soft, soft dough, good ingredients, everything kept simple. I'll allow for an egg and potato (little sauted potato cubes are good, come on it's like posh chips on a pizza). Artichokes and olives, capers, I suppose. Meat, but not if it's too oily, there's nothing worse that a slice suppurating oil from cheap pepperoni, so if you must go meaty, then some lean ham.
I mostly make my own pizzas these days. Unless you're lucky enough to have somewhere decent, it's the usual crap from Dominos, Papa Johns etc. For a country that's leapt forward in the overall culinary stakes, our takeaways are still in the 1970s. I did grab one from the supermarket on the way home the other day as I was eating pour un. Oh my, that as awful, basically a slice of bath sponge that someone had soaked in horrendously sweet tomato sauce. I had to check the label to make sure I'd not bought a weird dessert pizza. I had to throw it in the bin.