The Bay Area has its fair share of geeks and tech nerds. But when geekery gets combined with food obsession, what manifests is something like this. Two passionate techie friends decided to find out which Chicago-style pizza joint in SF (Little Star, Patxi’s, and Zachary’s) was truly the best. Sure they could have just ordered some take-out, tied on blind folds and simply declared their favorite, but that would have been way too easy.

Chicago natives David A. Shamma and his friend Daniel Raffel embarked on an arduous and well-thought out journey to determine the truly best Chicago deep-dish pizza joint and documented the whole process on his blog. He writes:

“On December 12th, we gathered our 12 testers in total. Entrepreneurs, product managers, engineers, scientists, designers, a pizzaiolo, a librarian and a lawyer rounded out our collection of people from around the bay area; half of these testers identified themselves as those who prefer New York pizza over Chicago. Three cheese Chicago-style pizzas were brought in locally from: Little Star, Patxi’s, and Zachary’s. The 2 shipped frozen and reheated from Chicago were Lou’s and Gino’s. All these pizzas were of Chicago Deep Dish style—not the “stuffed” variety.”

They also enlisted the help of Dr. Elizabeth F. Churchill, a scientist and cognitive psychologist specializing in human-computer interaction, to design and run the experiment.

So, after all this, who came out as the winner? Paxti’s.

To read the whole story, go here.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/xeeliz

• Tag: Best of, Contest, geek, pizza