Zizzi, 183 High Street, Harborne, B17 9QE T: 0121 428 4228
Verdict 5/10

Rossopomodoro, Selfridges Food Hall, The Bullring, B5 4BP, T: 0121 600 6753
Verdict 7/10

Pizza is one of the top two best ever meals, along with roast rib of beef and bacon and egg sandwiches.

Oh, that’s three, isn’t it?

OK. Pizza is one of the top three best ever meals, along with roast beef, bacon sarnies – and lobster and chips.

Except that’s four.

Ok, ok.

Pizza is one of the top four best ever meals, along with roast beef, bacon sarnies, lobster – and curry.

Hmm. This isn’t going to work. But hopefully you get the picture. Pizza is undoubtedly one of the most mouth-watering prospects in dining, definitely in the top ten. Well, “definitely” as in “maybe.” The top 20, quite possibly.

The thing about pizza is that when it’s done correctly it is simply stunning, not least because of its simplicity. Dough, tomato sauce, a bit of cheese, meat and/or a fist of veg. Bang it in the oven. It’s done by the time you’re ready for a second glass of vino. You can eat it with your fingers so the washing up is virtually nonexistent.

The problem with pizza though is that nine times out of 10 the finished product is rank. Like that great 80s band, pizzas tend to be wet, wet, wet – or the converse: incinerated, incinerated, incinerated. Rarely has there been such a gulf between the dream and the reality of eating as there is with pizza.

I fell in love with the food when movie disco king Tony Manero, played by John Travolta, sunk his pre-veneered gnashers into a floppy one during the opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever. Unfortunately, I lived in east Kent, not Brooklyn (pronounced “B-wook-lin”) and had to make do with Findus (pronounced “Fun-less”) “French bread” pizzas rather than a so-cool floppy double-decker from Lenny’s Pizza on 86th Street.

That first mouthful of dried out, string cheesed, dead-herbed carbohydrate should have served as a warning. Pizza in England would never be like pizza in New York. It would always be dumbed down, bastardised, rubbish, English. In fact, I have never had a good pizza.

And yet I have persevered, because we do, seeking the impossible, seeking Lenny’s Pizza.

Like all of us, I tried Pizza Hut in the 90s (I don’t need to say any more, do I?) and I have yakked on supermarkets’ “Just like mamma didn’t use to make” crust-stuffed, thin base, thick base, deep pan outrages. I’ve maniacally munched cold, soggy 20-inch pizzas delivered by moped in the middle of night to university digs. I’ve flirted, once, with the horrors of a Hawaiian and licked on cat-food quality dried tuna, smeared on blackened dough discs.

When I asked if it was possible to get good pizza in Birmingham the response bordered on deafening, so I went to Zizzi in Harborne. Zizzi is a high street chain and I went there because the non-chain high street pizza establishments also seem to sell kebabs, southern fried chicken and Pukka pies and that doesn’t strike me as typically Italian-American. Tony Manero wouldn’t have gone to a pizza joint selling reconstituted fish spanners.

But then I don’t think he would have sashayed into Zizzi either. I can’t comment for the other dishes on the menu because this was purely a “Project Pizza” investigation. For once, I didn’t particularly care about the setting, the service, the chips cooked three times or the triple marinaded sun-drenched virgin picked olives. It was all about the pizza.

At Zizzi, these are cooked in a large, bulbous oven that gives the impression of being wood-fired but which I reckon is probably heated by gas. (There’s a lot of wood in the place. Logs are stuffed into the walls. They’d make great kindling for the winter but I don’t think a lot of it goes in the flames.)

All the pizzas we ordered came on “rustica” bases, which are stretched out and thin. The finished pizzas cover a good sized carving board and look fairly impressive.

For the record, we tried a Piccante (spicy “n’Duja sausage”, salami, mushrooms, mozzarella, mascarpone, Roquito chilli and rocket, £12.95); a Sofia (spicy chicken, pepperoni, sausage, chilli and rosemary, £9.65); and, because my wife wasn’t there to be horrified, a Mare e Monti (half the pizza contains king prawns, courgette, mozzarella and crème frâiche, the other half spicy sausage, tomato sauce, chilli and rocket, £11.95).

They all suffered the same fatal flaw – they got very boring and cold. The toppings looked fine but weren’t the sort of quality you need to elevate a pizza from “just all right” to good. I can get “just all right” from Waitrose, across the road, at half the price.

The chef did a decent job and was super efficient but she needs better ingredients. The bases suffered from a lack of flavour, due again to the quality of the ingredients for the dough. A Ferrari cannot be built from a Mini Metro’s parts. The mascarpone on the Piccante wasn’t pleasant, smeary, sweet. The rustic potatoes, or whatever they were called, were forgettable.

With three soft drinks, the bill was £46.

Next up was the new kid on the block, Rossopomodoro, which opened fairly recently at Selfridges in the Bullring.