When we had a meeting leading up to the making of our Best Of issue, and the question was raised regarding best pizza, it seemed there was the closest thing to total consensus you could expect from a group as diverse as the one we had assembled. To be sure, in a town with as many pizza places as Reykjavík, the title of ‘Best Pizza’ is no small feat. So how do Gamla Smiðjan do it?
I called owner Ásgeir Blöndal to find out exactly that. Ásgeir said he’d been making pizzas for some 20 years, and knew that some day he would open his own shop. When this dream finally came true, he took the job very seriously.
“Everything is made right on the premises”, he said, explaining Gamla Smiðjan’s success. “I make the dough, the sauce, the garlic oil. It’s all done here. Plus, we only use high-quality ingredients”.
Ásgeir also wanted to point out that his pizzas are cooked in a wood-burning stove, using birch from Hallormsstaður, Iceland’s largest forest.
So while plenty of pizza companies are available to you—with choices ranging from the international to the domestic—you can count on Gamla Smiðjan to deliver, as Ásgeir put it, “Heaven in pizza form”.
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