Pizzaburgh

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This marvelous little joint is not too far from the Ross Park Mall, but it’s far enough off of McNightmare Road that you’d never find it if you weren’t looking for it. Luckily for you, Kurt and I are the Lewis and Clarke of pizzexploration, so we found this place on instinct alone with no help from our smartphones or any of that shit. We can’t say for sure if it’s affiliated with the OTHER Luciano’s we’ve reviewed, but perhaps there’s been an internal falling out. You know how Italians are.

Regardless, we’ve been here twice now, and both times the place was PACKED. Their dining room isn’t all that big (despite the name of the place, they do have a dining room), and they do a hustling take out business. But dining room aside, this place is packed for good reason. As you can see on their menu, dudes offer an absolute fuckton of options.

We opted for a large traditional, half plain/half broccoli and hot pepper:

Now, you KNOW it gets our blood boiling when a place advertises candyass banana peppers as hot peppers, and Luciano’s is no different. So, that’s strike one.

Also, note the size of the thing. Either Kurt or I could easily eat that alone in one sitting and barely be full. Large? Pfft. If this is what counts for large in Barack Obama’s America, we might as well just surrender to the Islamic State or whatever the fuck they’re calling themselves these days and just call it a night.

But still, first impressions aside, Kurt and I soldiered on. Y’know, for Old Glory. And we have to say, it’s a pretty dece pie. I always appreciate broccoli (probably tied with jalapenos for my favorite topping ever), the cheese is good, crust is nice and thin so you New Yawk types might dig this. The sauce is nice, mildly flavored, and it complements everything really well.

All told, this is a pie that really comes together. Honestly, we considered getting another one when we were finished, but if you look at that menu I linked to above, you’ll see that this shit ain’t cheap. Which is a HUGE strike two. You know that I don’t normally rant about the bang to buck ratio (except for when I do), and this wasn’t in the realm of the absurd or anything, but it is a little dear for such a modest, dare I say Oliver Swift-esque, pie. It left us both saying “please, oh please sir, can I have some more.”

 So, if you’re not too hungry and looking for a really solid pie, this is probably the place for you. That said, the first time we were there we got the Chicago style pie and found it to be a little more filling, if not really Chicago style—and we would know. Unfortunately, we forgot to take a picture of it, so we can’t document it here. But we’re definitely going to be back to try the pan pizza, and sometime when our pockets are extra fat we’re definitely going to look into that stuffed spinach jawn. I encourage you to do the same, and let us know what you think.

One of Kurt’s work buddies recommended this gem of a place to us. It’s nestled in, as Kurt puts it, “the old part of Mt. Lebanon, before the new money took over.” Given that a whole shitload of our favorite Pittsburgh pizza lies on that side of the Liberty Tunnel, in what we like to refer to as “Pittsburgh’s Pizza Triangle” (please start calling it that in your day to day lives, dear readers) we bundled up and braved the cold to give it a shot. And boy, were we glad we did. Little Nippers is a strange little joint that makes satisfying, greasy thin crust.

I’ll explain the “strange” parts later, but dig if you will this pizza pie. 

We realized that neither of us had any quarters on us to use for size reference, and it was cold as balls so we sure weren’t going to walk back to the car to grab one. Instead, we put the pizza next to an average sized man (me) for reference. That’s a large, half plain, half broccoli and feta. 

As you can see, it’s a sizable pie. Settling on toppings was kind of a challenge, because this joint has a ton of them. There’s seriously like 5 or 6 different kinds of cheeses on offer, which isn’t something you usually see, so THAT certainly impressed us. We like the idea of being able to dial in our own cheese blend, kind of like the cheese version of a stereo equalizer. Obviously, we want our cheeses all set to maximum, but we opted for a more conservative pie just to get a feel for the joint. Next time, though, we are going to overdrive that shit. 

And there will definitely be a next time, because this place is tight. As you can even see in the pic, the pizza is a little greasy, but in a good way. It’s not so greasy that the crust loses its crispness. And despite the cornucopia of cheeses on offer in this garden of earthly delights, I wouldn’t blame you for just sticking with the house blend. It’s a good mix of sharp and stringy and it definitely gets the Matt and Kurt seal of approval.

But there are a few odd things about Little Nippers. Namely, the physical layout of the restaurant. It’s gloriously divey, what with holes in the fabric of most of the booths and the like, but those very booths are like freakishly uncomfortable. It feels ridiculous pointing this out, so I’m fully aware of what a prissy thing that is to say (even though yinz know how I love me a good classic shithole), but not even kidding. The booths facing each other are so close together that Kurt and I had to purposefully arrange ourselves so our knees weren’t touching. Which is fine (or maybe even beneficial) for a date or even a mandate like ours, but just make sure you don’t end up there with someone you don’t like, unless you've got really short legs.

Also, everyone working there is super friendly, but mayhaps a little odd. Not in a bad way, but in a “curious enough to warrant comment” way. For instance, one of them was talking to us about NPR and his love of Michael Savage. Two things that don’t particularly tend to go together, unless you really just like hearing people talk, regardless of subject matter or batshit über-rightist nonsense.

These little quirks certainly don’t count against the place, though. If anything, they gave it a vaguely Lynchian vibe. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go put a gun in my mouth for even typing the word “Lynchian.” Since this is the last you’ll hear from me before I splatter my brains all over my bathroom, if you make it out to Little Nippers (and you should, because it's quirky and wonderful and they make good pizza), drop a slice on the floor for me. I’ll be watching you from heaven. Which is basically just a big greasy pizza that you live inside anyway.

If you’ve ever thought to yourself “man, this pizza is great, but I sure do wish that it cost more money for less of it, and that I felt underdressed eating it in a t-shirt,” have we got a place for you. Il Pizzaolio makes a mean pie, but it comes at a hefty price. And not just a monetary one. Let me explain.

Il Pizzaiolo has two locations, one in Mt. Lebanon and one in Market Square downtown. After this place was suggested awhile back as a pizzability by a dear reader on our Facebook page (which, if you haven’t liked already, quit being a dick), we decided to take a drive to the Mt. Lebanon location and sample their wares.

We settled on a filetto, which is Italian for “small and overpriced.” Apparently this is a phrase that Italian has as many words for as Eskimos do about snow, according to the old myth, because all the pizzas on their menu have names that mean that too. Anyway, the filetto features mozzarella and pecorino cheeses, basil, olive oil, and tomatoes (but cherry tomatoes, which are kinda ick IMO. If you share my opinion, consider yourself warned). This is what it looks like:

As you can see (and as you’d expect if you read their menu), they don’t cut their pizza at Il Pizzaiolo. Apparently this has something to do with the “integrity” of the pie, which sounds like absolute horseshit at first blush. But our waiter explained to us that since a lot of their pies have olive oil on them, if the pie is cut before being served the oil will seep through the cuts and fuck up the crust (Although, just to be clear, he did not say “fuck up” but rather kept repeating words like “authenticity”). Which is something we must begrudgingly admit makes more sense than the pomposity of the disclaimer on the menu would imply.

As for that crust, it’s actually really fucking good. It’s got that thing going on that all of those highfalutin fancy-oven pies get where it’s cooked super fast and super hot so some of it comes out a little charred. Sometimes this can be gross, but that isn’t the case here. It was actually done just right. And I’ve already made my opinions on cherry tomatoes known, but the rest of the toppings are also great. The cheese is absolutely delicious, with the strong flavor of the pecorino complimenting the mild mozzarella perfectly. Basil and olive oil are two ingredients that can easily overwhelm something, but they were also handled really well. And if you want sprinklins, they’ll bring them to you under the guise of “fresh grated parmesan” and “fresh crushed red peppers,” like Tony in the back there has the fucking mortar and pestle out and is doing it to order or whatever.

In sum, this pizza is good. Really goddamn good. But the “integrity of the pizza” and “fresh crushed red peppers” things are just the tip of the fuckery iceberg with this place. For lack of a better metaphor, eating there was akin to what I would imagine it feels like to be a high school-aged Juggalo in Iowa or something. In other words, I did not feel as though I fit in. Which, whatever, no one feels like they fit in everywhere, but this isn’t an emotional experience I usually associate with pizza. Pizza, to me, represents the exact opposite of that. It’s the single great unifying force that bridges all social/economic/political/whatever gaps, no matter how large. And it’s like this place was designed as some kind of Orwellian response to that, to make a pizzeria feel more like an oyster bar or something.

See, that pizza above is not large. It would easily satisfy a single person, maybe even one of us on a slow day, but it was equivalent in price to most of the pizzas we review here that are, like, three times its size. While the ingredients are indisputably quality, and the technique in assembling them is most admirable, those two things together don’t necessarily justify the markup—we eat tons of pizza clearly made lovingly out of carefully selected components.

In other words, what you’re partially paying for here is the “experience,” and I mean that in a less than favorable way. At least part of the bill is compensation for the experience of feeling like the kind of person who gives a fuck whether his red pepper flakes are “fresh crushed” and not just out of the same goddamn plastic shaker that you have on your spice rack at home. For the experience of drinking what’s probably tap water out of a glass carafe. For the experience of dining on artisan comfort food far away from the riffraff and their fiberglass booths and 2 liters of cola in a (shudder to think) self-service cooler. For the experience of feeling like a gourmand not just because you watched Giada At Home a couple times but because some teenage waiter is taking the time to explain the “integrity of pizza” to you personally.

And let me be clear, if the fact that I write this blog doesn’t make it clear enough—I take pizza really fucking seriously. It is my favorite food in the whole wide world. I appreciate it in all forms, from the banal to the bizarre and, yes, to the fancy. So it’s not really the price or the striving for traditional perfection that irks me about Il Pizzaiolo. In fact, I find their adherence to traditionalism impressive and worthy of due compensation.

What bugs me about this place is how transparently proud of itself it is for being artisanal, for its carefully constructed exclusivity in both price and environment. Kurt used the phrase “gentrified pizza” to describe this place (he also suggested that we refer to it as “ILL Pizzaiolo.” Dude’s on a fucking roll). “Gentrified” about sums it up. It’s probably a good litmus test for how you’ll feel eating there, too. If “gentrified” has positive connotations to you, like “oh cool now I can experience this thing that used to be classless but is now totally acceptable for fancy people like me,” then you’ll love it. If it sounds suspiciously imperialistic and hegemonic to you like it does to us, well then you probably understand what I’m trying to get at.

 I realize that all of this is getting really lengthy and that it’s pretty messy. I hope I don’t just sound like I’m ranting; I’m trying my best to talk about something that’s honestly really hard for me to explain but no less visceral and real. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that Il Pizzaiolo pizza is definitely worth trying, if you’ve got the wallet for it or maybe if you’re on a date with an heiress or something and you can deal with an environment that I find, frankly, very self-congratulatory, off-putting, and bordering on offensive. It’s delicious pizza. But you know what? It’s practically across the street from another delicious pizza joint that’s way more affordable and staffed by people who are clearly less fucking anal. And you know what else? I’d be lying if I said we didn’t stop there to decompress before heading home.

Recently Matt and I made it back to Chicago because we were traveling for a conference, and in addition to our old favorite, Giordano’s, we wanted to check out a new deep dish delight during our weekend in the Windy City. We saw some good reviews of Pizzeria Due, but when we went to check it out, not only did they have a huge wait to get a table, but we discovered that it’s part of the Uno family. We’re confident that Due makes a good pie, but we just wanted to try something a little bit off the beaten path. We found some good feedback on a place called Edwardo’s and decided to give it a spin and pray that the pizza gods were on our side.

They were. Edwardo’s has a few locations, and we went to the one at 266 North Halsted. It’s a delightfully unpresumptuous hole-in-the-wall just below the street level, and there was no wait. In fact, when we got there, the only other people there were a couple who were finishing up their din. Now, normally, Chicago deep dish brings in the throngs and hordes like moths to a flame, so we were a little concerned that we didn’t have a massively annoying wait. But we held in there. If given a choice, we’d rather not wait for pizza anyway, as a general rule.

We went by our standard sample protocol and ordered a half plain and half veggie pie. In this case, we got mushrooms – because the menu insisted they were fresh, which is rare – and garlic. Smelly choices, you say? The fact is, our girlfriends were hundreds of miles away, so we decided that we had free license to be stanky.

The mushrooms were, indeed, fresh, and they were delicious and not even too wet. But as good as they were, they were totally overshadowed by the marvelous majesty of the garlic. I mean, dear holy baby Jesus, the garlic! As you can see in the photo, the ingenious Edwardo’s staff members slice the garlic longways, producing generous, bite-sized bursts of garlic flavor. Matt and I agreed that we had NEVER had better garlic on a pizza. That’s a hell of a triumph in our reckoning.

Without a doubt, the crust contributes a lot to the greatness of this pizza. Matt and I noted that Edwardo’s has definitely been studying the Giordano’s playbook, but that’s not a bad thing. Despite being a deep dish pizza, the crust itself is actually relatively thin, and as you can see in the pics, it’s crisp and flaky. If you look closely, you can see that there are sort of two layers of crust, and the layers kind of come apart at the edges. That’s actually pretty cool and makes for nice nibbles that you can enjoy in between the vast, wolfing bites that you need to make in order to work your way through this pizza. The sauce and cheese were pretty standard but still tasty and delivered with kindly Midwestern generosity.

All in all, Edwardo’s is an easy two thumbs up for us. It’s not the most distinctive Chicago pie you’ll come across, but it is obviously crafted with artistry and, like I said, might be seen as a flaky, cheesy tribute to our ultimate deep dish favorite, Giordano’s. And, at least with regard to the location we went to, the experience offered an awesome respite from the waiting-45-minutes-with-a-shitton-of-annoying-tourists experience that’s pretty standard at places like Giordano’s, Gino’s East, and Lou Malnati’s. Did we mention it was a Saturday night, even? The quietude alone was great, and the pizza was magnificent. A+ all the way around.

-- Kurt

Kurt and I ventured out to Luciano’s in White Oak for what would likely be our final new pizza of 2014. The Google Maps description of this joint calls it a “vast Italian eatery” (seriously, no shit), so we had to ask: how vast would the pizza itself be? Would its breathtaking splendor help us forget about all the troubles of these dark times?

See, in reflection, unless you’re into cops murdering civilians and the academic-industrial complex pandering to rape apologists and misogynistic computer nerds stealing titpics and the CIA torturing people, 2014 has been kind of a shit year to be an American and a human being. But if it was a good year for anything, it was a good year for pizza. Kurt and I kicked a lot of ass this year in that regard, and we certainly didn’t plan on slowing down for the holiday season. Just look at what we ate last week:

As you can see, Kurt and I are fighting to keep the “Christ” in “Jesus Christ that’s a lot of pizza.” That’s a large, half plain, half onion and green pepper.

At Luciano’s, “green pepper” apparently means “a mix of green and red bell peppers,” but whatever. You can see in the picture above that these are quality veggies, heaped on generously. They weren’t cooked long enough to lose their crispiness, so they added a good crunch to the toppings half of the pie.

The cheese was also nice, but I’m gonna go ahead and say it: least interesting part of this pie. I know long-time readers will be shocked by this assertion, seeing as how it’s coming from a guy who used to regularly take bites out of blocks of cheese from his fridge (now that I’m older and more civilized I learned that cutting off a slice is worth dirtying a knife just to avoid the shame), but seriously. Not that there was anything WRONG with Luciano's cheese, not at all. This is just a testament to the quality of the other two fundamentals of this pie: the crust and the sauce.

The crust was excellent. Doughy, light, salty, slightly crisp, and in that sweet spot where you find so many Pittsburgh pies—not quite NYC thin, but still a long way to go before it could be considered thick crust. It tasted almost reminiscent of just really really good soda bread. Through some cheese and sauce on that shit and magic happens.

And oh, did I say sauce? Luciano’s has a really curious sauce. It’s on the sweeter side, but not so sweet that purists might be offended. I've often said that usually I don’t give one shit about sauce when there’s cheese to be had, but this one had a nice blend of sweet and flavorful. You could taste the tomatoes, definitely, but you could also taste lots of seasoning.

So, if you’re still in town and looking for someplace to stuff your face over the holidays, we recommend trying this pie. The sauce alone is enough to sell it, but it’s got all the fundamentals.

Also, if you’ll let me get a little sentimental for a moment, whatever holiday(s) you’re celebrating around this time of year (and I know we’re a couple days late for the start of Hanukkah, sorry if that’s your bag), we hope they’re awesome. Safe travels to those of you who may be traveling, safe at home time for those of you who aren’t. We don’t know how many of you there are out there in cyberspace that read our little blog here, but we’re so grateful for all of you and we hoist a slice (or 5) in your honor.

Foli’s, like many of the suburban pizza joints of our youth, is located in a tiny little strip mall. It’s a little off the beaten path—spitting distance from 376 and rt. 30, but not really visible from either—so its continued success suggests quality. We went in with high hopes and ordered this beautiful beast:

That’s a large, half plain, half onions and spinach. Alas, we didn’t have our trusty reference quarter, so we had to use a $20 bill, which is kind of the same thing as many many quarters.

We enjoyed just about everything about this pie. The cheese was an entirely noncontroversial amount—not enough to cool down into a solid chunk, but far from sparse. It was sharp, but not too sharp.

The crust was also good. Not too thick, not too thin, not too crispy, not too soft. We liked the sauce—it was neither chunky nor runny, spicy nor bland.

Our fellow English majors, and the rest among you skilled in textual analysis, may be noticing a theme here. Foli’s is basically the Little Bear’s porridge of pizza. Nothing about it is particularly controversial; it’s hard to imagine someone being dissatisfied with it.

We’ve said this before about other pizza places, though, but this agreeableness kind of renders it a bit indistinct. It’s certainly not a place that I can imagine describing with my normal hyperbolic gusto. This is not to say we didn’t enjoy it—this pie was really really good and it left us perfectly satisfied. I’d definitely eat it again, as it’s relatively close to where I live. Unfortunately, I’m outside their delivery zone. But if I were? Fuck yeah, I’d order it for a night in or to share with company. It’s just a good, workmanlike pie.

So, if Foli’s is near to you and you’ve somehow not tried it, or if you find yourself heading out that way, we definitely recommend that you stop in and give it a shot. Or, if you’re looking for a new place to go that you’re basically guaranteed to enjoy, it’s really easy to get to from just about anywhere in town that’s near the highway. We get so caught up sometimes writing about all the crazy (and/or excessive) pies that we eat that it’s easy to forget how nice a simple, everyday pie can be. If you’re looking for that, and not for a conversation starter, Foli’s might be the place for you.

Driving back from Chicago, we made the crazy choice to eat even more pizza. That makes five pizzas in as many days, because we are goddamn monsters. We’d gotten a late start, so we were passing near South Bend, IN around dinnertime. We figured what with it being such a major college town and all (Notre Dame is there, in case you live under a rock, and they're allegedly good at some sport and at drinking), there had to be some pizza worth trying.

A quick search on the interweb confirmed this, but getting pizza in this vile den of papacy turned out to be harder than one would expect. Several of the joints with top ratings online were closed, despite having posted hours that promised otherwise. Pizza King was our last resort before throwing in the towel on our pizza, but like that one fucking movie starring Samwise Gamgee where he overcomes his dyslexia and hobbit height and the fact that he had asthma in The Goonies and still gets to play Notre Dame football, we stuck to our dreams and ultimately prevailed.

Just look at this fun sign and exterior. The outside and some of the internal decorations totally suggest that this place used to be a Mexican restaurant. Which is totally apropos, because pizza is pretty much the only food I’d rather eat than Mexican. I prefer to think of it not as a scenario wherein one business closes and gets replaced with another, because that’s a little sad for the people that ran the Mexican place, but more like one wherein the restaurant gets enough XP to level up to its final form.

They served us this jawn, a large plain, which as you can see is cut into square pieces despite being a round pie, a quirky little touch that you can also enjoy here in the 'burgh. We scarfed it down eagerly, road weary as we were, with ample sprinklins and Red Hot. We enjoyed the crispy crust and the mild cheese and sauce. We also enjoyed the fact that absolutely no one there was mean to us, despite having every right to be since we showed up like 20 minutes before their closing time (which, unlike their dickheaded competition throughout town, was actually posted on the motherfucking door). So, if you ever find yourself in South Bend, we enthusiastically recommend this place. The people are nice to crabby hungry punks passing through and the pizza is quality.

For our final pie on our pizza pilgrimage, we ventured to Pequod’s Pizza. Our hearts were heavy with thoughts of our trip’s impending end, bringing with it a return to both our day-to-day lives and the gym. But lo, on the horizon, we saw this beautiful sight:

Pequod’s takes their Moby Dick theme and runs with it on all their branding—their website and menus and t-shirts all feature that little white whale guy, who looks like he has panties on his head, unless it’s some sort of deeper reference that I don’t get because I never made it through Moby Dick since that shit is booooooooooring.

So, was this an omen? Would our obsessive hunt for pizza finally be our downfall? Kurt and I ventured on undeterred, Ahab-like, to find out. And we ordered this bad boy for our final meal (on vacation, and possibly IN OUR LIVES DUN DUN DUN):

That’s a large, half plain, half onion and pepperoncini. Yeah, that’s right. Fucking pepperoncini. In my three decades on this planet, I have NEVER seen that as an available topping. The only association I have between pizza and pepperoncini is as an additional item that comes when you get delivery from a certain lackluster firm run by an arch-conservative shitbag. So, seeing them on an actual menu? Color us impressed! They gave the pie some delicious heat, and went well with the big ol’ chunks of onions.

I’m getting so carried away talking about the topping variety, though, that I’m neglecting to mention the most distinctive feature of this pizza: the crust. Unlike Giordano’s, this isn’t a stuffed pie. It’s more like what the rest of us tend to think of when we think of “deep dish”—it’s thick, but there’s no extra layer of crust on top. As you can sort of see there in the picture above, though, at Pequod’s the crust is distinctively charred. On the menu, they call it “caramelized,” and I’m pretty sure it’s done by burning a little bit of extra cheese on the crust. You can get a better view of what it looks like in these shots:

And damn, that crust was good. Even before you got to the blackened parts. It was thick as hell, crunchy, and hearty. The cheese was also delicious here, laid on thick and good and gooey. The cheese and sauce got a little charred at points too, as you can see, so all around this was one just deliciously burnt pie. If any of yinz are chemists and can explain to us why those burnt parts tasted so fucking good instead of, y’know, burnt, AND/OR why it doesn’t taste as good when I burn the food I’m making at home, we’d be much obliged.

So, we happily downed this pie in toto, with the weight in our hearts decreasing inversely with the weight in our tummies. We knew that the next day we’d have a long ride home, but Paquod’s left us happily sated. At least until the next morning at breakfast.

http://andrewwk.com/news/andrews-pizza-guitar

Added to the list of reasons Andrew W.K. kicks ass.

When we visited Chicago and ate Giordano's and Gino's East, we somehow had the haunting feeling that somehow we hadn't gotten it quite right.  But you know what they say: the third time's the charm. For our third pie, we tried a place we’d never been to before: Pizano’s

Compared to the undeniably slicker and more touristy Giordano’s and Gino’s East, Pizano’s has more the feel of a neighborhood favorite than a tourist staple.

At Pizano’s we got a pie with sweet and delicious onions.  It was an utter joy.  The sauce is a little chunkier than usual and mild to the taste.

If the crust at Gino’s East smacks of cornmeal, Pizano’s crust is remarkably buttery.  And they put tons of cheese on those motherfuckers.  Absolutely delicious.

What bad can we say about Pizano’s?  Well, one little thing.  They have a bitchy policy whereby they charge you full prices for half toppings.  We did not care for this.  But we had the last laugh by just getting toppings on the whole pizza.  So we showed those assholes – big time!

It’s impossible to write this review of Pizano’s without mentioning an additional quirky feature of the facilities.  They have a payphone in the potty.  Just … they have a payphone in the potty.  Look at the picture.  Now, in my opinion they dropped the ball by not making the cord long enough so that you can talk on the phone will standing at the urinal or sitting on the commode.  Chalk that as a missed opportunity on their part.  But we didn’t miss the opportunity to stuff our Pennsylvanian faces full of their pizza – complete with a full pie of full-price toppings!

Chicago means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.  It’s windy, corrupt, the birthplace of “horn rock,” the home of the Cubs and the Willis Tower, and the capital of the Midwest.  Now, all that stuff is well and good, but to us, Chicago means one thing first and foremost: P-I-Z-Z-A. Chicago-style deep dish (or “stuffed”) pizza is distinctive and mindblowingly delicious, and believe us, that “deep dish” pie that you’re buying in Atlanta or St. Louis or Austin is wherever is probably absolute shit.  Unless you’re actually in Chicago, “deep dish” almost always just means a crustier pizza – not a Chicago-style pizza.  To get that, you have to actually suck it up, pay the turnpike tolls, and go to Chicago.

We’ve done summer trips to the Windy City three times, and each time, we’ve tried a few different pizzas.  Even among Chicago pizza, there’s a surprising amount of variation.  The good news is that it is all fucking amazing.  But you know what some people say about Chicago-style pizza?  That it’s “not pizza.”  They are mistaken.  It’s all OTHER pizza out there that falls short.  Literally and figuratively.

Three years of empirical research have demonstrated that our absolute favorite Chicago pie is offered by Giordano’s.  But we’re fans of several other joints, too, and it’s the diversity of the Chicago pizza offerings that’s most exciting.

Like Giordano’s, Gino’s East is a favorite of Windy Cityers and tourists alike.  We got a half plain and half mushroom garlic.  The toppings are noticeably fresh, and the combination that we got was truly delicious. 

Gino’s crust is probably the most distinctive quality of their pies.  As you can see in the picture, the crust seems to have a yellow cast to it.   I think that’s because there’s actually some cornmeal in the crust, which is dense and crumbly when you break it.  It’s full of substance and bliss.

It’s also impossible to ignore the cheese on this pie, which is delightfully heavy and excessive.  In the photo above you can see the cheese trail that inevitably happens when you pull a piece away from the whole.  The sauce on this pizza wasn’t as flavorful as Giordno’s but still no slouch.

Gino’s also has a wall of fame where people pledge allegiance to their losing home team or indicate that their now-failed relationship will last “4 ever.”  Matt and I contributed with a graffito about something that will REALLY endure: this blog.

On our first night in the Windy City, we decided to sup at our favorite joint: Giordano’s Pizzeria. Giordano’s is one of the big names in Chicago za, claiming to have invented stuffed pizza. Stuffed pizza is basically indistinguishable from other Chicago-style pizza; there’s just a super thin layer of dough on top that pretty much blends in with the cheese. If you weren’t looking for it, you probably wouldn’t know it was there.

So, what with Giordano’s being one of the more well-known pizza joints, you might wonder if it lives up to the hype. The answer, in short, is “yes. Dear god, yes.” Just look at this bastard:

That is a large, half plain, half jalapenos and onions. Just looking at this picture brings a tear to my eye remembering it. Since Giordano’s (like all Chicago-style places) puts your cheese under the sauce, you can’t really see what’s what in these pictures, but there is a goddamn ton of it. Mountains and mountains of delicious, mouthwatering, artery-clogging, stretchy, gooey, marvelous cheese. And it is beautiful. It is flavorful and, as you can see in this picture, so stretchy that strings of it flop on top of the pie when you try to cut it.

The toppings shone, as well. It’s not every day that you see a pizza joint with jalapenos (here in the burgh at least; I’m pretty sure everywhere we went in Chicago had them on the menu with maybe one exception), and they brought some welcome heat to the pie—the kind of heat I always crave when some bitchass menumaker or whatever labels banana peppers as “hot.” The onions also brought a good bump of sweet flavor.

Delicious as all this is, though, the sauce and the crust are what really set Giordano’s apart from the competition. The sauce is thick but not particularly chunky (think thicker “restaurant style” salsa for a textural reference point—not entirely homogenous, but not with large discernable chunks) and spiced to perfection. It brings the perfect level of flavor to the cheese, dough, and toppings.

And the crust. Jesus Christ, the crust. Giordano’s has a flaky crust (not quite as flaky as one of our Pittsburgh faves that you are all no doubt sick of hearing us go on about, but flaky nonetheless). You can see how it flakes into layers here:

You can also see how happy we are to be eating it. I mean, look at me shoveling it into my fucking hole like a goddamn maniac.

This pizza isn’t just a pizza, it’s a goddamn occasion. Like all the pies we ate on this trip, it’s serious business. Not for kids. The delicious crust and sauce, for us, set this guy just ever so slightly above the rest. But that’s certainly not to say that our other pizzas were anticlimactic (they were absolutely anything but), just that we got this trip started on a high note. There was still a world of delicious pizza to explore. 

The first round of Pittsburgh Business Times's completely arbitrary and unscientific Pizza Madness contest ends in a couple hours. You can vote here, and you fucking SHOULD, because currently our faves at Slice on Broadway are losing their bracket, which is a tragedy of epic proportions.

Our faves at Spak Brothers are losing their bracket, too, and that is also a tragedy, but they're currently on our shit list because they have a Facebook "profile," not a "page," and we messaged them forever ago about sharing our review and they never wrote back. Which reminds me...have YOU liked our Facebook page?