Pizza crust boot-camp, the philosophy of making a pie: Vancouverites soak up ultimate Las Vegas pizza event​on March 28, 2025 at 1:00 pm

What could be more fun than a pizza convention, except perhaps a pizza and Chianti convention.

But the International Pizza Expo and Conference, held this week in Las Vegas, is serious business, too.

Vancouver, for example, was introduced to the Detroit-style pizza after the 2019 expo.

“That’s where we brought back the Detroit pizza from, one of the seminars,” said A.J. Caridi, who with his wife, Theresa, owns AJ’s Brooklyn Pizza Joint in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

Caridi is now a Canadian, but grew up on Neapolitan-style pizza in New York.

It was his inability to find a pizza place in Vancouver that reminded him of home once the Caridis moved to Vancouver two decades ago that husband and wife began tossing dough and making sauce in the kitchen of their apartment, before their joint opened in 2017.

In some ways the pizza expo is like any industry show. In its 40th year, it attracts 40,000 attendees from around the world, along with suppliers, merchandisers and foodie critics.

There are workshops on pizzeria management for newbies to the business, and pizza-making demonstrations (with instructors Will Grant, winner of the World Pizza Championship 2017 who began his pizza-making pursuit at age eight), and Graziano Bertuzzo (a European legend who was 14 when he became a pizza chef).

Tony Gemignani, who Caridi believes is tied with Peter Reinhart for making the best pizzas in the world, gives a lecture on making dough, with a ticket costing US$290. Many seminars are free, but the ones featuring world-class talents cost US$250 and up.

Gemignani is the only triple-crown winner at the International pizza Championships in Lecce, Italy, and is a former champion at the World Pizza Cup in Naples, the first American and non-Neapolitan winner.

These are the rock stars of the pizzaiolo (pizza maker) world; imagine rubbing shoulders with them.

“I was following Tony G. way before I was in the pizza business,” Caridi said, “and a lot of this stuff that he does I’ve replicated in a very good way.”

There’s a class in how to use different cheese blends, a panel discussion on pizzerias owned by women, a talk on square pizza followed by a talk on contemporary pizza, and a panel discussion on the post-COVID-19 changes that are here to stay. There’s also a class on Italian sandwiches.

One seminar examines vegan pizza (cashew “cheese”), another the science of flavour, taste and texture, and one more focuses on a question that’s been confounding publicans everywhere: beer bottles or taps, or both.