Best Cocktails To Pair With Your Favourite Pizza, From Neapolitan Classics To Chicago Deep Dish

Top cocktails to complement pizza rely on the dough, sauce, and toppings rather than just matching rich food with popular drinks. Different pizzas, such as Neapolitan pizza and Chicago pizza, call for different cocktail pairings, due to the difference in ingredients influencing the right pairing. For a rainy-day movie night, choosing established cocktail classics creates combinations that feel balanced while complementing the pizza perfectly.

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The Right Cocktail For Every Pizza On Your Rainy Day Movie Night

Traditional Neapolitan Pizza is popular for its light and chewy crust, the use of fresh mozzarella cheese, and the addition of tomatoes and basil. The light flavours of this dish blend perfectly with the largely bitter and slightly bittersweet taste of the Negroni cocktail, which is based on gin, red vermouth, and bitter orange liqueur. This pairing highlights the classic Italian connection between the dish and the beverage. 

A New York-Style Pizza is characterised by its large slices, hand-tossed, thin-crust and foldable due to the liberal amounts of mozzarella and tomato sauce. The sourness of a Johnnie Walker Whisky Sour (made with Red Label) cocktail adds citrusy notes and a smooth texture that meshes beautifully with the chunky cheese topping, even as the savoury element of the pizza remains front and centre. For a sweeter take on the cocktail, try to make it with Bourbon. The Bourbon's vanilla and caramel notes also work particularly well with pepperoni or sausage toppings without becoming overly sweet.

A Chicago Deep Dish Pizza consists of a buttery, thick dough, plenty of cheese and chunks of tomato sauce spread on top of the toppings. The heavy pizza is complemented well by the bitter flavour of the Boulevardier cocktail, which is a drink that uses whisky as its foundational spirit. The oakiness of the whisky adds richness to the drink along with the vermouth, while the bitter taste of the orange liqueur balances the cheesy pizza with its tomato fillings. 

The Roman Pizza or Pizza Romana is a distinct style originating from Rome, famous for its paper-thin, ultra-crispy crust that shatters when you bite it. The emphasis is laid on fresh ingredients like mozzarella, tomatoes, anchovies, prosciutto, or any seasonal vegetables, but care is taken not to overdo the toppings. The fewer, the better in this case because of the thin crust. The mixture of gin and basil complements the fresh herbs from the pizza. The lemon in the drink also cuts through the rich cheese. The gin’s herby botanicals and the fresh and light profile of the pizza are perfectly balanced, skipping any flavour clashes.

A White Pizza (Pizza Bianca) replaces tomato sauce with cheeses like ricotta or mozzarella, sometimes topped with garlic, mushrooms or herbs. The Dry Martini cocktail provides an excellent match for these moderate flavours due to the clean herbaceousness of its ingredients, which complement herbal toppings without any fruitiness or sweetness. The botanicals of juniper, coriander and vermouth make it a perfect match to the creaminess of the cheeses.

Keep Pizza Pairings Balanced

For a flavourful rainy-day movie night, small adjustments make classic pairings more thoughtful:

• Match bitterness with rich cheese-based pizzas.

• Use citrus-forward cocktails alongside tomato-based pizzas.

• Let herbaceous cocktails complement basil, oregano and fresh greens.

• Avoid overly sweet cocktails with savoury pizzas, as they can flatten delicate flavours.

Conclusion

The perfect cocktails to accompany your favourite type of pizza have less to do with which kinds are most popular and more to do with the flavours used in preparing the pizzas. If you succeed in finding a classic cocktail that is well balanced, you will have no trouble pairing it with a pizza that includes either prominent smoky flavours or tangy, creamy or herbaceous flavours. For a perfect rainy-day movie night, you must always try to keep the cocktails and the pizzas in balance with one another.

*Drink Responsibly. This communication is for audiences above the age of 25.