Gawker’s Max Read posted an interesting article the other day, detailing a theory (the Most Important Pizza Theory You’ll Read, in fact) on the concentration of good pizza in the northeast. Generally speaking, this “Pizza Belt” extends from southern Jersey up to Providence, RI, and represents a region where the odds of finding an “adequate-to-good” slice of pizza is better than fifty percent.

Proving that singularity seldom exists in the scientific community, this pizza theory has been around for quite some time. Ed Levine of Serious Eats fame postulated his Pizza Belt Theory in his 2005 guide, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. Levine goes so far as to trace this regional phenomenon back to southern Italian immigration patterns (naturally) through some anecdotal tales of the northeast’s pizza juggernauts and their origins; an interesting read if you haven’t stumbled upon it already in the last seven and a half years.

So, you say, how relevant is all of this science and history hooey? Well, the Stamford Pizza Tour represents a single data point, smack in the middle of the famed Pizza Belt. Taking a look at our leaderboard, local favorites like Rico’s, Pappas, and Coalhouse sit below the halfway point on our scale, but still represent very reputable and, at the very least, “adequate-to-good” pizza establishments—theory upheld.

Now, if some likeminded native sons from the rest of the Pizza Belt (looking at you, Patterson, NJ) would like to be as intrepid as us and provide some more data toward this theory, kids could be reading about us in whatever replaces the thing that replaces textbooks (it might take some time).