Paris has more good pizza than it did a decade ago. Has it produced a pizza, or only pizzaioli?
Paris's serious pizza is either imported Neapolitan technique or one maker's personal reinvention. Nothing found here is a Parisian discipline — no citywide grammar of the kind Chicago or Buenos Aires can show. In shape Paris is closer to Madrid than to New Haven, and it is filed that way. The individual records are strong. Guillaume Grasso works an AVPN-certified wood oven with a family lineage running back to a Neapolitan grandfather. Giuseppe Cutraro at Peppe is a world champion who opened just before the March 2020 lockdown. Davide Luca at Fimmina runs a 72-hour fermentation and names his pizzas after actresses. The clearest distinctiveness case is Dan Pearson's Oobatz, whose six-flour pure-levain dough and non-wood oven are a genuine invention — but an invention belonging to one kitchen, not to the city. That distinction is the whole point of separating strength from distinctiveness. Paris scores on the first and has little to show on the second, and a guide that collapsed the two would rank it as though a room full of excellent imports were the same thing as a pizza culture.
Guillaume Grasso is the first AVPN-certified (Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana) pizzaiolo in Paris, cooking in a wood-fired oven left behind by a previous pizzeria at the same address. His own account traces the shop to his grandfather, a Neapolitan who settled in Paris after fleeing the war, and to a 2013 trip to Naples where Grasso trained before opening in 2018.
Verified 2026-09-18
Oobatz is a Paris-born pizza project by an American baker, Dan Pearson (previously of Ten Belles and Rigmarole), built around a six-flour, pure-levain dough rested 36 hours and a deliberately non-traditional oven. It is a genuine test case for whether Paris has worked anything of its own into the form rather than reproducing Naples: the dough and bake are locally devised, not an import of an Italian house style.
Verified 2026-09-18
Peppe Cutraro won the world championship for contemporary Neapolitan pizza in Naples in 2019 and 2020 before opening his own room on Place Saint-Blaise, just before the March 2020 lockdown, per a named Paris critic who visited that July. A separate food-press piece on the dough describes a three-flour blend with a hydrated sourdough starter left to rise overnight, cooked well below standard Neapolitan oven temperature for extra lightness.
Verified 2026-09-18
L'Impasto was founded in 2017 by Jean-Edouard Pigrenet, a former director of the French pizzaiolo school's Paris branch, on a premise of long-matured dough; the Nation room is one of the group's current addresses and its own site names the founders and describes the dough's long maturation, though it stops short of stating the dough is made at this specific location.
Verified 2026-09-18
La Manifattura is a design-forward Montparnasse address with pizzaiolo Angelo Cipullo at the oven and a soft, well-leavened dough, served alongside a fuller Italian menu of pasta, meat and fish rather than as a pizza-only room.
Verified 2026-09-18
Fimmina is a small two-level Neapolitan pizzeria run by Sicilian-trained pizzaiolo Davide Luca and his wife. The dough is slow-fermented — 72 hours, per the maker — and the pizzas are named after Italian actresses.
Verified 2026-09-18
