At the halfway point, the best pizza restaurant in Rehoboth is . . .

Henlopen Pizza Kitchen

If you decide to review all the pizza at the Delaware Shore, sooner or later you encounter the Rehoboth problem. There is pizza everywhere.

Seriously. Rehoboth Beach may have more pizza restaurants per vacationing child than anywhere in America. There are old pizza institutions, new arrivals, upscale pizza restaurants, takeout joints, places serving New York-style pizza, places serving Neapolitan pizza, places serving Detroit-style pizza, and restaurants where pizza is only part of a much larger menu.

We have eaten at a lot of them. But not all of them.

That distinction matters because this is the second installment of our DE Pizza Online halfway-point report card. We've now reviewed almost half the pizza places on our original list, but we're nowhere near finished. That's particularly true in Rehoboth. So this is not a lifetime achievement award. It's not even an end-of-season championship.

It's more like being ahead at halftime.

And at halftime, Henlopen Pizza Kitchen is our choice for the best pizza restaurant we've reviewed in Rehoboth Beach.

The pork and broccoli rabe pizza eaten by your reviewers. Photo by your correspondent.

HPK's victory begins with something that sounds almost boring: the plain cheese pizza.

It wasn't boring. In fact, one of our reviewers called it “the first pizza we've had in Delaware that truly reminded me of the pizza I grew up eating in New York.”

In our world, that's serious business. We have a reviewer who has spent an unreasonable portion of this project searching for the New York pizza of his childhood. Finding a pizza that triggers that particular sense memory is roughly equivalent to a paleontologist finding a previously unknown dinosaur.

The fundamentals were all there. The pizza was thin. It folded properly. The mozzarella was real mozzarella and tasted like it — rich, slightly fatty, and flavorful. The crust was chewy, flavorful, and salty enough to announce its presence.

Even Younger Son, making his DE Pizza Online reviewing debut, got a little carried away. He said the cheese, sauce, and crust formed “an orchestral whole.”

“The pizza brings out the fancy words,” another reviewer observed. Apparently so.

HPK also passed the industry-recognized standards for pizza engineering. The slice folded. The toppings stayed where they belonged. Cheese did not fly across the table. There was no need for napkin blotting or emergency stain removal. Or, as Younger Son put it more scientifically: “Minimal drippage.”

[We acknowledge that DE Pizza Online may need a glossary of terms]

The half-plain and half-pepperoni pizza eaten by your reviewers. Note the cupped pepperoni with a little glisten of grease. Photo by your correspondent.

Then there was the pepperoni, which may have been even better. It was crispy, slightly cupped and flavorful, with those little pools of pepperoni grease that make you understand why pizza is unlikely ever to appear on a cardiologist's list of recommended foods.

But hang on a minute. Not everything worked as well.

We also ordered a roasted pork and broccoli rabe pizza, which sounded spectacular on paper. For one reviewer, it sparked memories of childhood trips to Philadelphia where pork-and-broccoli-rabe sandwiches shared the culinary stage with cheesesteaks.

Unfortunately, the pizza didn't live up to those memories. It needed more garlic. More salt. More something.

That's important because the imperfections help explain why HPK rated 7 out of 8 slices rather than a perfect 8. The cheese pizza was the star. The pepperoni was outstanding. Yet, the more ambitious specialty pizza couldn't quite keep up.

There was also an unusual feature of our Henlopen experience: we didn't actually eat at HPK. We carried our pizzas next door to Coastal Taproom, which became our unofficial HPK dining room for the evening. There, we enjoyed cold beer, lots of televisions and an apparently inexhaustible supply of 1980s music. One reviewer dated the soundtrack very specifically to 1983.

We cannot independently verify that.

We can verify that eating very good pizza in a bar is fun.

Our service evaluation was similarly complicated because Younger Son picked up the pizzas at HPK and walked them next door. Asked to assess the service, he declared it “Outstanding. Truly excellent.” Self-praise is apparently permitted on DE Pizza Online.

When the scoring was finished, Younger Son gave HPK a 6. Another reviewer somehow discovered quarter-slices and awarded it 6¾. The third gave it a 7 and seriously considered an 8.

The average was 6.58. Because DE Pizza Online loves pizza and pizzaristas. and generally believes in rounding in pizza's favor, Henlopen Pizza Kitchen received a final score of 7 out of 8 slices.

More important than the arithmetic was what produced it: a plain cheese pizza good enough to stand on its own. Real mozzarella. Excellent pepperoni. A crust with chew and flavor. Proper folding. Minimal drippage.

In other words, Henlopen got the basics right. And sometimes the basics are the hardest part.

Congratulations to Henlopen Pizza Kitchen: DE Pizza Online's halfway-point choice for the best pizza restaurant we've reviewed in Rehoboth Beach.

There is still a lot of Rehoboth pizza left to eat. It's a difficult job, but someone has to do it. And that someone is DE Pizza Online.