deep dish

hook about popularity of deep dish pizza and composition

So who here has had a deep dish before? Yeah! It’s pretty much one of the first things anyone thinks about when you mention Chicago. Just like the city she came from, she is super unique; instead of a bread like crust baked on oven bricks, deep dish has a floury, almost biscuit-like outside fried to crispiness by the olive oil coated cake pan it bakes in for 40 minutes. That gives us a hint as to why the cheese is under the sauce, can anyone guess why? Right, the cheese would burn if it didn’t have all that sauce to protect it. This pizza is unlike a lot of its cousins you have to get a few slices of to be full- one slice is a full meal. One thing I will drill into y’all’s heads by the end of this tour is that Chicago’s famous fast food is almost always super hearty and filling because we are a city of industry. Our hard working poor needed heavy meals to get them through their long days- they didn’t have time for some new-York thin crust! (Full offense).

Tavern predecessor and Italian immigrants

so while that yummy deep dish is VERY Chicagoan, our first Chicago pizza wasn’t deep dish; in the early 20th century, the pizza developed by Italian immigrants in south side bars had a crispy unleavened crust that you could whip up quickly and serve in free little squares to keep the drunks fed and ready for another round. This is why local Chicago restaurants selling a thin-crust cut into squares will call it “tavern style” pizza; they served it in “taverns”. A lot of chicagoans actually claim tavern style is the real “Chicago style pizza” because, being real, we’ll usually only have deep dish when a non-Chicagoan visits. But suddenly, when someone mentions deep dish, we all have strong opinions about who’s best (spoiler alert it’s Lou’s), but one thing we can be objective about is where it started.

Pizzeria Uno (formerly Ricardo’s bar) story and misconception about who probably created it (bc owners couldn’t cook)

So, in 1943, Ricardo’s bar unveiled the new deep dish pizza, and it was an instant hit, so they decided to rebrand to Pizzeria uno to better reflect the main attraction, and it’s still called that today. While uno’s official story is that their owners, ric Ricardo and Ike Sewell, invented deep dish themselves from scratch, there’s a hole in that story; those two couldn’t cook! They actually tried to start their food ventures with Mexican food (neither being Mexican ofc) and gave each other food poisoning!! The more logical assumption is that their experienced pizza chefs, Alice Mae Redmond and Rudy malnati were probably the real inventors.

pizza descendants

Another pizzeria, Gino’s east, is definitely invested in the theory that Alice invented it, because they sniped her from pizzeria uno for themselves!I i imagine them pulling up to her after a long shift where her bosses claimed THEY made the invention she poured her blood sweat and tears into and saying “Alice, get in the cahhh” before revealing a stack of cash. Rudy malnati, the second potential inventor, kept his family in the pizza business, and his sons, Rudy jr. and Lou, founded pizanos and Lou malnati’s respectively.