If you draw a 10-km circle around Wiesbaden.....stretching out west to Schlangenbad, north to Niedernhausen, east to Hofheim, and south to include all of Mainz....there are probably sixty different pizza operations within this circle. I admit....it's a lot.
If you go to Bierstadt, the neighborhood on the east part of town....there's like 12 pizza operations within a one mile circle. People in this area are obsessed with pizza.
Wiesbadeners sometimes joke about the number of Italian establishments in the region...calling it 'Little Italy'.
American-style? The only place left is Pizza Hut....Dominos shut down about six months ago.
The best in town? This gets argued about. Out in Niedernhausen, there's La Cittadella. In Wiesbaden itself, there's Pizzeria Vesuvio. In Mainz, there's Al Cortile. On the outskirts of Wiesbaden, there's Pizza-to-Go (it's been around for fifty-odd years now). In Bebrich, there's Pizzeria Gianluca.
I think part of the problem for the US chain of Dominos in catching on in Wiesbaden....was that there are simply too many operations offering fine pizza with their own homemade recipe.
Is this all due to an American influence on the area? I think in the 1970s and 1980s.....the American community helped stabilize and carry the market. But today.....the German customer trend is pro-pizza and ensures the survival of these various pizzerias. If you went to a hundred Americans in the community and asked them about a choice between a Pizza hut pizza or a German-Italian-style pizza.....they'd probably sit and think about it for a minute and three-quarters of them would select the German-Italian-style.
Are there more Italian-related restaurants now in Wiesbaden than German-type restaurants? Yes. This is one of those little things that you come to notice now.....with an ample number of Turkish Kebab, Asian, and Indian shops growing. This is one of the odd features of the town and it's differet food cultures.
Just humble words over food and culture in the city.
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