Pizza is unpretentious. In its simplest form, a doughy crust is layered with seasoned tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese and baked in an oven at a high temperature. It is perfectly comfortable on a paper plate and can be washed down with anything from water to wine. But when you dress it up with fancy toppings or cheese, perhaps playing with the thickness and composition of the crust while you’re at it, pizza takes on a posh new life.

Recently, some of Sarasota’s best restaurants have been creating their own upscale variations of the popular treat. Pizza no longer needs to be ordered over glass-topped counters in unassuming little eateries or delivered in a cardboard container to your doorstep; now you can have it served on a silver platter as part of a gourmet dining experience.

Ever abreast of culinary trends—and ever-eager to get our fair share of new treats—we cooked up a contest to find the best gourmet pizza in Sarasota. We decided to concentrate on restaurants known for consistency and quality, where patrons spend time enjoying their meal; and after polling a number of passionate foodies, we settled on five places whose pizzas are making a name for themselves and asked them to prepare their signature pie for our panel of judges. Then we blocked out three hours one balmy afternoon and, with the help of Longboat Limousine (top-drawer pizza deserves top-drawer transportation, after all), descended upon each restaurant, where our panelists had 30 minutes to eat and render their verdict.

Each judge was eminently qualified to do just that. John Bancroft, our food and wine editor, is a longtime restaurant critic who used to choose the prestigious Golden Spoon winners for the former Arizona Trend magazine; now he writes our food and wine reviews, dining anonymously around town. His wife, Colette, book editor of the St. Petersburg Times, is also a former restaurant critic. Mark Famiglio is best known as CEO of Sarasota-based Copytalk and for his philanthropic support of all sorts of local causes, but he’s also a lifelong pizza expert—his Roman grandmother taught him to make his first one when he was four years old. His wife, Jennie, an attorney and soon-to-be mother of twin girls, insists “there’s no such thing as bad pizza,” but proved adept at separating the good from the great. Chef Judi Gallagher, Sarasota’s contributing food and wine editor, has owned restaurants, consults for local and national restaurateurs, and blogs about the best in local food and drink for her “Foodie’s Notebook” at sarasotamagazine.com. And as the magazine’s copy editor and the writer of this story, I was an enthusiastic taster but refrained from scoring any of the entries.

We began the tasting at 5-One-6 Burns. Each judge looked appropriately excited and hungry as we gathered around the cozy bar, pens poised over scorecards. Owner Max Burke-Phillips greeted everyone, passing out menus and pouring glasses of water, while pizza chef Anna Norman swiftly prepared the first pie of the afternoon and tended the wood-burning oven in the background. “She’s like a painter,” Judi remarked, as Anna arranged the toppings—tomato sauce, mozzarella, capicollo ham, roasted peppers, onion and arugula pesto—on the canvas of homemade dough.

Before long, we were biting into our first pizza of the afternoon. John Bancroft loved the thin, crispy crust, proclaiming deep-dish pizza “a wretched thing.” His wife, Colette, enjoyed the woody taste that the oven gave the dough and the complexity of the flavors, but Mark Famiglio thought that the pizza was “a little bland” and needed a bit of garlic to fully round out the flavors.

We could have spent the rest of the afternoon in that intimate, friendly atmosphere, but we pulled ourselves off the bar stools and headed to our second tasting, at Caragiulo’s on Palm Avenue. When we arrived, a table—complete with trays of colorful peppers, cheese and olives—had already been set, and the judges (except mother-to-be-Jennie) happily accepted the wine that the server poured, toasting to the slices to come.

Soon after, the pie—a “glorified bianca,” according to co-owner Mark Caragiulo—arrived, and chatter turned to blissful silence as we dug in. Jennie thought the pizza, which was topped with house-made mozzarella, pancetta, garlicky ricotta cheese, cherry tomatoes and a leafy bed of arugula with Parmesan cheese, was “delicious, savory and hearty.” Judi declared it outstanding. “It conjures up memories of a New York-style pizza joint,” she enthused. “This is a damn good pizza.” John, however, deemed the pizza “way too salty” and thought that the arugula looked nice, but added little to the overall flavor of the pizza. “It gilded the lily pad,” he said. But everybody agreed that the glasses of limoncello that followed the pizza made for a fabulous finale.