Chain Pizza Restaurants

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It feels like this summer I’ve done nothing but order pizza after pizza. Not because my family loves pizza (we do), but because we have been hosting friends or family nearly every weekend.

When you host, your options are: 1) Ask the guest to bring food, potluck style. 2) Buy a bunch of ingredients and lose hours in prep work, cooking and cleanup. 3) Order food from a restaurant, which can get real expensive, real fast.

Pizza sits at the budget option of No. 3. It’s not much more expensive than buying all the food to grill burgers (have you seen the price of beef lately!?), but it saves you the time of cooking and what seems like an eternity of cleanup. It keeps you engaged with your guests – and no one complains.

Toss a bowl of salad out there and you have yourself a complete meal.

But because I’m doing this nearly every weekend, I have to switch up where I’m ordering from so I don’t go crazy. Which leads to today’s rankings: Chain Pizza Restaurants.

Regionality will always make this a difficult discussion.

Is California Pizza Kitchen a top-10 chain pizza in America? Maybe! Genuinely, maybe. But try finding one if you don't live within driving distance of the west coast. Same story for a dozen other regional chains with rabid local followings and basically zero footprint anywhere else. That's the thing about pizza — unlike burgers or fried chicken, it doesn't travel nationally the same way. It clusters.

So the rule for this list: at least 15 states, real distribution, not a hometown hero with a cult following and three locations. That knocked out a few chains I considered — including one I order from often, Gambino's, which is mostly a Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska chain.

Look, I’m in the midwest, so I drifted midwest. Is there bias? Well, yeah, they are my rankings. It's where I'm from, it's what I grew up eating. If you're below the Mason-Dixon, hanging out on the west coast or a New York-only type person, that's exactly what the reply button is for.

Yes, it’s a gas station. But Casey's is the 5th largest pizza chain in the country for a reason — they make the dough from scratch every morning, and it’s affordable. (Also, as a card-carrying member of Casey’s Rewards, about 1 in 5 of my orders is free or nearly free). Their business model was basically to be the only pizza place in every small town across Iowa and Nebraska. And it worked.

Domino's is the pizza equivalent of a reliable, old pickup truck. Not exciting. Never lets you down. Gets you through all kinds of bad storms or muddy situations. If I was ranking thin crust, this would move up, but I’m going just classic, original style for these rankings.

All my local Marco’s were also doing video rentals. Made me feel like I was walking into Blockbuster as a kid. They’ve since dropped the video and are focused on their pizza, which is the right call. This is the cost-to-taste ratio pick. Marco's is a good pizza for a fair price, and it nails that target better than almost anyone on this list.

Papa John’s has slipped over the years, I feel like. But it has a distinct taste to the sauce that I enjoy quite a bit. “Better ingredients. Better pizza.” is actually false, in my opinion, because our number 1 on this list has the better ingredients.

Non-negotiable caveat: this is full restaurant, not the gas station mini-pizza program. If your only exposure to Godfather's is the 7-inch, all-crust version you get at a Speedway counter, you haven’t had the real thing. The full size pizza nails the ratio of thick crust to sauce to cheese. It’s my favorite chain sauce, my favorite crust, and I think most of their ingredients are above the competition (though still fall way short of nearly every locally owned pizza joint).

I don’t know the exact number of books I read as a kid to earn my free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut, but it isn’t small. There was something about my brothers and me all turning in our coupon and drinking our fountain soda out of those red plastic cups. Pizza Hut is a great cost-to-taste ratio option; I just couldn’t find a spot for it in my Top 5.

In the midwest, Pizza Ranch has expanded quite a bit over the last 15 years. Known for its buffet, Pizza Ranch has decent pizza. No complaints here. But, in my opinion, the real star of the show is the fried chicken. Toss in some mashed potatoes and gravy, and the buffet can stack up against any of the Top 5. But the pizza alone just can’t carry it, which is how I looked at these rankings.

Again, regionality matters here. When my wife and I visited Washington, D.C. a few years back, we ate only pizza for lunch nearly every day. It was a way to try local/regional shops and save our budget for more formal dinner restaurants (shout out to Old Ebbitt Grill’s blueberry cobbler).

And you know what? It was one of my favorite ways to do vacation. We had four different pizzas over five days. La Casina was my favorite, for the record.

OK, tell me some regional hits that I need to try next time I travel.