How Pizza Became the World's Favorite Food (And Why Watford Loves It)
There is something almost unfair about pizza. It is not particularly fancy. It does not require a reservation. It does not care what mood you are in or how many people are coming. It just works, every single time. And the story of how a cheap street snack from 18th-century Naples became the most ordered food on the planet is genuinely one of the stranger journeys in culinary history.
Worth knowing before your next slice.
It started with people who had very little
Naples in the 1700s was loud, crowded, and poor. Street vendors were selling flatbreads topped with whatever was cheapest — tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, occasionally a scraping of cheese. No wood-paneled dining rooms. No signature cocktails. Just food that filled you up without costing much.
Here is the detail most people do not know: tomatoes were considered poisonous by much of Europe at the time. Wealthy Italians would not touch them. But the poor of Naples had no room to be fussy about what was and was not fashionable to eat. They tried the tomatoes. Turns out they were not poisonous. Turns out they were extraordinary on bread. Necessity, in this case, produced something genuinely brilliant.
The queen who changed everything
Jump forward to 1889. Queen Margherita of Savoy is visiting Naples and — this detail always surprises people — she is bored of French food. The royal diet at the time leaned heavily French, and she wants something different. She asks to try this street food the city is famous for.
A pizzaiolo named Raffaele Esposito makes her three versions. The one she wants again. Tomato, mozzarella, basil. Red, white, green. The colours of the Italian flag. He names it after her, and just like that, pizza stops being food for people who cannot afford anything else and becomes Italian culture. The Margherita has carried that name for over 130 years.
How it got everywhere else
Millions of Italians emigrated to America between the 1880s and early 1900s, and they brought pizza with them. It landed in New York's working-class neighbourhoods and took root immediately — cheap, filling, easy to share, and genuinely delicious. America then did what it tends to do: scaled it up, piled on more toppings, and exported it everywhere.
By the time pizza properly arrived in Britain in the 1980s and 90s, it was already unstoppable. Today, pizza near me is one of the most searched food phrases in the country, run every single day by millions of people who have somehow forgotten they ever ate anything else.
Why stone baking matters
This part is worth understanding properly, because it is not a marketing phrase. When pizza goes into a stone oven at 400 degrees Celsius or above, the base hits the stone directly and cooks almost instantly from the bottom up. The moisture escapes fast. The outside goes crisp. The inside stays light and airy. And you get a slight char on the underside — not burnt, charred, which is a different thing entirely — that adds a depth of flavour you simply cannot fake.
A conveyor belt oven or a metal tray cannot do this. The pizza sits in its own steam, the base softens, and the texture that makes a great pizza worth eating disappears. Stone baking is not a trend. It is physics. It is why the original Neapolitan pizzerias cooked this way, and why the best ones still do.
At Prime Pizza in Watford, the stone baking is not a detail — it is the whole point. Every pizza that comes out of that oven is built on the same principle those Neapolitan street vendors understood before anyone had given it a name: proper heat, proper dough, no shortcuts.
Why Watford searches for it
Watford has no shortage of pizza. Chains, independents, delivery apps — the options are there. But the searches tell an interesting story. People are not just typing pizza delivery. They are typing best stone baked pizza Watford and authentic pizza near me, which is a different kind of question. It means they have had a properly made pizza at some point and now know the difference.
And the difference is obvious from the first bite. The base has character, tor it does not. The cheese either melts the way it should, or it does not. Once you know what you are looking for, the other kind starts to feel like a compromise you did not consciously agree to.
What has stayed the same
Despite deep dish, stuffed crust, sourdough bases, vegan everything, and truffle oil on things that have no business wearing truffle oil — the best pizzas in the world still follow the same logic as those Neapolitan flatbreads from 300 years ago. Simple ingredients. Proper technique. Real heat.
When Prime Pizza puts a stone baked Margherita in front of you — the one named after a queen who just wanted a break from French food — you are not just having dinner. You are eating something with a very long history. It just happens to be delivered to your door in Watford.
Craving a properly made stone baked pizza? Prime Pizza Watford is open for collection and delivery. Order at primepizza.co.uk or find us on your delivery platform.
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