I turned 25 this past week and celebrated my Birthday by organizing something that I've wanted to do for a long long time - a Pizza Off!

A Pizza Off is an event where the participants order as many pizza pies as possible from as many different pizzerias as possible, bring them all to a central location at the same time, (Instructables HQ of course) and then eat them all and test which ones they like best!

It's not something that you can do on your own, do to limitations of space, time and belly, so I was grateful when the entire Squid Labs community decided that this sounded like an awesome idea to them as well.

The rules were simple (taken from the original email announcement):

• You must bring a pie with you. Think of it as a ticket for entry - if you plan on partaking, you've got to have a pie. We (as in the royal I) will allow sharing of one pie per two people. Ideally each person would bring their own pie, but I'm no tyrant.
• Your pizza must be from your favorite SF pizza joint. The pie you bring says something about who you are, so drive the extra mile to the place that's a little further, but twice as good. Each and every person in this building is beautiful, and your pizza should be too.
• You and your pie must arrive promptly at Instructables HQ at 1:00.
• You can bring whatever type of pizza you like, from whatever pizza joint you think is best. Ideally we'd all get plain cheese pies so we could truly compare, but if you've got to have something fancy on your pie, rock out.
• This event is all about two things: pizza and excess, so if you're thinking, oh I don't really need to bring a pie, it will be too much food...I'll just eat some pizza and stand around the table - you're wrong. This event only works if we hit critical pizza mass, so I'm counting on each and every one of you to help.

When Tuesday rolled around, we ended up having 15 different pies from 13 different pizzerias! There were gourmet pizza pies from local worker owned bakery Arizmendi, traditional Italian cheese pies from North Beach, deep dish pies from San Francisco and East Bay favorite Zachary's, thin crust brick oven pies from Pizzeria Delfina and even Indian food pizza - which actually turned out to be an awesome flavor explosion!

I almost made it "round the pizza world", but then some late entries showed up and the crusts caught up with me. There was a huge happy turnout, plenty of ravenous mouths, delicious pizza of all kinds and we all lived to tell the story of the first ever Pizza Off - all in all I'd call it a huge success!

For anyone who doesn't already know, I love NY style pizza, and in my opinion, the best NY slices in San Francisco are from Arinell's on Valencia, so that's where I got my pie from. Everyone had their own favorites though, so I won't presume to report on any definitive results from the testing. I will say though that there's a pizza type for everyone, and I am never ceased to be amazed by the magic and wonder of Pizza.

We're planning on having future Food Offs testing out other ubiquitous tasty foods. Some of the first things that I'd like to test are:

• Pad Thai
• Egg Rolls
• Pho
• Burgers
• Ice Cream
• Coffee
• Ribs
• Burritos
• Tacos

Anyone else ever do anything like this? Find 15 friends who are as crazed about food as you are and make it happen!