Dublin spot voted best pizza in Ireland for third year running
Little Pyg, in Dublin's Powerscourt Townhouse Centre was awarded the accolade by 50 Top Pizza, a food publication and guide that celebrates the highest culinary achievements in the competitive world of pizza.
The prizes were awarded last night at a ceremony in Madrid, with pizzerias from across Europe celebrated. Little Pyg was the only Irish spot named on the list. This year's win for best pizzeria in Ireland is its third in a row.
Launched in Italy in 2017, the 50 Top Pizza Awards are curated by food critics Barbara Guerra, Luciano Pignataro and Albert Sapere and are voted on by 2,000 anonymous inspectors that travel across Europe and review pizzerias. The restaurants are graded on everything from dough quality and innovation, to ingredient sourcing and service.
Little Pyg is the sister restaurant to Dublin favourite Pygmalion, and opened just before the outbreak of Covid-19. Pizzas are one of their specialties, with each pizza chef sent to Italy for one year, to train under Enzo Coccia, a celebrated pizza expert. It had ranked at no. 27 on the list last year.
It was also famously visited by The Real Housewives of New Jersey cast in 2022, while on their group trip to Ireland.
Naples on the Road in London, headed up by Michele Pascarella and his team, was awarded the top spot for the seconf year in a row, with Revelry in Madrid coming in second place. Via Toledo Enopizzeria in Vienna, Austria, rounded out the top three.
Having made it into Europe's Top 18 Pizzerias, Little Pyg will go on to represent Irelanf at the World Pizza Championships in Naples this September.
Speaking from Madrid, owner Paul McGlade Jnr shared his pride in the team, saying: "We're very proud of Federico, who is regarded as one of the best pizzaiolos in the world and our team at Little Pyg, it's a great award for their hard work and dedication."
Little Pyg's head chef Federico Rapali also reacted to the win: "I'm incredibly proud to share that we have been named Best Pizzeria in Ireland for the third year in a row as well as ranking #16 in Europe at the 2025 Top Pizza Awards. This recognition means everything. It is a reflection of relentless passion, long hours and the belief that great pizza can bring people together.
"To my amazing team and our loyal guests, thank you for making this journey possible. What started as a dream has grown into something far greater than I ever imagined. Here's to tradition, innovation and never settling for anything less than excellence."
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This was the start of a chasm between Irish people and Irish Americans that exists today. While in general, Irish Americans look fondly at the island many see as their ancestral home, the descendants of the Irish who stayed look at them with less affection.) Ireland's affinity for Tupac is just the latest in a mutual sense of kinship shared by Irish people and Black American activists that can be traced across centuries. The IRA and the Black Panther Party were founded to fight back against oppressive states. Both established networks of community services to provide what the state failed to offer. Both faced suppression through counterintelligence. And both sought a radical left- wing reorganization of society. The two groups, not failing to spot the parallels, used their own newspapers to report on and support each other's cause. It was instinctual for Irish freedom fighters to express solidarity with other political prisoners given their long history of imprisonment at the hands of the British state. Throughout the twentieth century, Irish prisoners used hunger strikes to protest British authority, many condemning themselves to the horrible fate of death by starvation. Playwright and politician Terence MacSwiney died after a seventy-four-day hunger strike in 1920; his demise was known to have had a profound impact on Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican Black nationalist leader. Garvey even sent telegrams to both British prime minister David Lloyd George, urging him to compromise so Mac-Swiney's life could be spared, and to Mac Swiney's priest, asking him to "convey to McSwiney [sic] sympathy of 400,000,000 Negroes." Garvey's admiration for the Irish response to colonial rule had been total. 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Around the one hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, a key event in the Irish struggle for independence, a Facebook page was set up with the purpose of ensuring Tupac received credit for his contributions to the cause. The group's admins photoshopped Tupac into old photos, alongside Connolly, Pearse, and other heroes of the armed rebellion who'd almost all been executed for the part they played. It was for laughs, yes, but through meme culture, the group was ambiently solidifying the bond. It made a weird kind of sense: Tupac Shakur was in the original IRA. The joke wouldn't have worked with any other rapper— maybe, even, no other American.
