#deep dish

https://chicago.suntimes.com/food-drink/2025/07/16/lou-malnatis-portillos-chicago-hot-dog-style-pizza

CONGRATS, you are the first! (Link here.) My initial (potentially incorrect) thought was that it can only be an improvement over my much loathed Chicago Deep Dish:

On top of a Lou’s deep-dish crust sits Chicago dog essentials: mustard, relish, white onions, tomatoes, pickles, sport peppers and celery salt.

Like, I wouldn't eat that, but that's because I don't want vegetables of any kind on my dog. It still sounds more appetizing than an inch of tepid cheese and a crust of bland marinara, which is what Chicago Deep Dish generally is.

I'm not sure it's being properly described, though. That makes it sound like it's just a Chicago dog in a deep dish crust instead of a bun. But looking at the photo there's clearly a red sauce of some kind, and the description obviously leaves out the hot dog. Which in the photo looks more like kielbasa. That's Polish and thus very Chicago, but not a Chicago dog. Vienna Beef or death, my comrades.

So is it an entire deep dish, cheese and sauce included, with just a layer of Chicago Dog on top? That's also kind of inappropriate because a basic tenet of deep dish is that the toppings are underneath.

No, this should be re-engineered from the pan up. If we're going to do this, we're going to do it properly. You start with your deep dish crust, using poppyseed instead of cornmeal underneath to pay proper homage to the bun, then layer sliced griddled Vienna Beef hot dog, sport pepper, onion, and tomato under the cheese. The relish gets tossed into the red sauce, which is spread over the top of the cheese, and then after the pie comes out of the oven you stripe with mustard (I would sub in a garlic brown mustard for the usual yellow) and finish with celery salt.

It still wouldn't be good, because Chicago deep dish is fundamentally bad, but at least it would be more spiritually apt.