“Chicago style” pizza is a deeply controversial topic, both inside Chicago and throughout the country.

The controversy outside the city is whether deep dish pizza is even pizza. Jon Stewart and millions of New Yorkers dismissively call it a casserole. Eating pizza with a fork and knife is so déclassé that they universally mocked their own mayor when he did so.

The controversy inside the city is over which of the indigenous styles of pizza in Chicago deserves the term “Chicago style.” Chicago has at least five separate styles of pizza invented or popularized here (deep dish, deep pan with caramelized cheese, stuffed, thin crust, and double decker) and each has its own partisans. But the big, knockdown fights are between the thin crust aficionados and the deep dish lovers.

Millions of South Side Chicagoans are Team Thin Crust—many of whom have never had a deep dish pizza in their lives (it is not a style commonly found south of Madison Street) and it’s championed by Chicago’s own Pizza City USA evangelist Steve Dolinsky. It goes by many names (“thin crust,” “square cut,” “party cut” and the oddly divisive “tavern cut”) but it’s easily the most common pizza style found in mom and pop pizzerias around Chicagoland.

Meanwhile, on the North Side and Chicagoland suburbs, as well as the minds of most people outside of Chicago, deep dish is the true exemplar of Chicago style pizza. In a debate over the subject a few years back at Pizza City Fest, Marc Malnati (the owner of Lou Malnati’s, a chain of more than 75 deep dish pizzerias) claimed to have sold over five million deep dish pizzas the previous year. Paraphrasing Marc, “If deep dish isn’t popular or only an occasional indulgence, who’s buying all these pizzas?”

I think these fights are kind of silly, and that’s how most people treat them, as a light bit of fun. I’m a pizza universalist. I love all kinds of pizza as long as they are made with care and passion.

So in my series, Pizza Wars, I’m going to make the best case for each of the major styles of Chicago pizza. I’m going to highlight pizzerias that really nail their style of pizza. This shouldn’t be read as “the best” pizzeria of each style – it’s a list of personal favorites. As a friend of mine says, “there are no bests, only favorites.”

In this first installment of Pizza Wars, we’re going to start with the elephant in the room—deep dish pizza—and see an example of it at its best.

Uncle Jerry’s Pizza Company, Cary, IL

Jerry Czerwinski calls his pizza “pan pizza,” which just goes to show that the terminology around Chicago pizza styles is consistently inconsistent.

When I talk about deep dish pizza, I am talking about a style of pizza that is cooked in a pan with a relatively thin crust that is pushed to the edges of the pan, and then pulled partway up the walls of the pan. This style of pizza is usually built “upside down,” as in the cheese is laid down first, followed in order by sausage or spinach, crushed tomatoes, grated cheese, veggies and finally pepperoni and/or seasonings.

It was invented at Ric Riccardo’s The Pizzeria in 1943 (later renamed Pizzeria Uno when they opened a second location, Pizzeria Due, kitty-corner from the first spot) and further refined by generations of the Malnati family (who worked at Riccardo’s before opening their own pizzerias, Lou Malnati’s and Pizano’s) and by longtime chef Alice Mae Redmond, who modified the original recipe using an old family biscuit recipe to make it easier to spread in the pan and later went on to create the pizza at Gino’s East.

A short detour

If you want a taste of Alice Mae’s artistry, it lives on in all its original glory at Georgio’s Pizza in Crystal Lake and South Barrington. Owner Brian Coli learned how to make deep dish pizza from Alice Mae and her sister Ruth Hadley when they worked for his father Michael at his Elmwood Park pizzeria, Old World Pizza.

Eating deep dish pizza at Georgio’s is like stepping back in time to Gino’s East during the 70s and 80s when Alice Mae and Ruth were running the kitchens and it was crowned “Best Pizza in the Country” by Jeff Jarvis in People Magazine. There is no deep dish pizza in the city limits as good as the pizza out here in the Northwest Suburbs.

Coli honors the sisters who invented modern deep dish pizza - the About page on his website is a love letter to them. And the pizza itself is:

Georgio’s Pizza
75 E Woodstock St, Crystal Lake, IL 60014
(815) 459-8888
100 W Higgins Rd, South Barrington, IL 60010
(847) 844-1988
Mon-Thur 11-9, Fri-Sat 11-10, Sun 11-9

Jerry grew up on Lou Malnati’s pizza and the deep pan pizzas of Burt Katz (founder of Gulliver’s, Pequod’s and the eponymous Burt’s Place) that have a bready crust surrounded by a deeply caramelized edge of cheese reminiscent of a Detroit pizza’s frico edge.

When he and wife Nancy moved out to far suburban Cary, IL, there were no good deep dish or pan pizzas around, so he began experimenting with making his own. After years and years of experiments and pizza parties with friends, he nailed down a hybrid of those two styles, the thin, pressed short dough of deep dish and the caramelized cheese of deep pan.

Jerry started getting requests for frozen pizzas from friends and neighbors that they could bake at home, and he began a small operation just to satisfy this small but enthusiastic audience. He and Nancy began thinking about opening a pizzeria and came close a few times, but the timing and location never worked out. But when COVID hit, his frozen pizzas started to develop a wider following and he was making so many that he started seriously considering making the pizza business his full time job.

Serendipitously, a local butcher shop that had a large restaurant space also had a vacancy, so during the height of COVID, Jerry and family began converting the space into Uncle Jerry’s Pizza Company.

As Illinois began to reopen after its lockdowns, Uncle Jerry’s opened up as well, part of a wave of pizza entrepreneurs that launched during the pandemic. Cary is a sleepy little community about 45 miles northwest of downtown Chicago and not on anyone’s pizza radar, but the locals knew a good thing and began to flock to Uncle Jerry’s.

One of those people, inadvertently, was me. I had taken my son out for one of those “get out to the countryside” trips everyone was doing as the lockdowns were easing and we ended up not far from Cary. As is often the case, we were in the mood for pizza and happened onto Uncle Jerry’s on the basis of a good looking couple of pictures found on the web. Boy, howdy, was I glad to have stumbled on it.

Jerry makes what is easily my favorite deep dish pizza in all of Chicagoland. Although the heaviness of deep dish pizza is often overstated, Jerry’s is lighter than all of them. It’s the crust that really separates Jerry’s from the rest—very thin, light and airy on the bottom and extremely crisp around the edge.

That edge also has a caramelized cheese layer. Jerry lays slices of high quality part-buffalo mozzarella cheese up the edge of the pan, which browns deeply in the oven and merges with the crust to create a delicious and superlative crunch. While Jerry’s crust is closest in style to Lou Malnati’s crust, it has much more flavor. Some techniques borrowed from focaccia and a little salt really make it stand out.

As a true native of Chicagoland, I am required by law to order at least one pizza that has sausage.

Jerry has developed his own sausage recipe, a light garlic sausage, that is ground fresh by the in-house butcher (the restaurant is literally inside a butcher shop). A solid layer of sausage is pinched and pressed onto the cheese, then big ladles of Jerry’s sweet, tangy and savory tomato sauce are spread on top. A scattering of grated cheese and high-quality pepperoni is added, and when the pie is fired, the pepperoni becomes cupped and curled for a spicy, slightly crispy, meatiness.

Jerry and I have become friends and we collaborated on a pizza that has become an occasional special at the restaurant and a favorite of the entire Czerwinski family.

The Rosa is a deceptively simple but flavor packed pizza that is an homage to the pizza of the same name at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix (which is personally my favorite pizza in the whole world).

On top of his fantastic crust and cheese, big handfuls of grated parmesan cheese are layered on top, along with slivered red onions, rosemary, extra virgin olive oil and lightly crushed pistachios. The smell coming out of the oven is intoxicating. That combination of rosemary, red onion and parmesan creates a mouthwatering aroma. Heads turn when they smell this one coming out of the oven.

In the years since opening, the Czerwinski family has grown a lot as pizza makers and business operators.

In addition to Jerry and Nancy, the Czerwinski kids are a huge part of the business. Chloe is an up-and-coming pizzaiola on her own (I had the pleasure of being a judge when she was a contestant at the National Pizza Show) and works the ovens while Casey is working the line and building the pizzas. Other members of the family help out when they can and some nights it feels like there are more Czerwinskis than can possibly fit in one place!

Uncle Jerry’s has been discovered by the wider pizza community with stories by Nick Kindelsperger in the Chicago Tribune and Steve Dolinsky when he was NBC5 Chicago’s The Food Guy. But as much as those early stories helped put Uncle Jerry’s on the map, nothing could have prepared them for a visit by Mr. One Bite himself—Dave Portnoy. Like everyone who meets them, Dave was immediately taken by their wholesome welcoming attitude, donning one of their signature tie-dyed t-shirts and giving them a “monster” 8.3 score—one of the highest given to any Illinois pizzeria.

That bumped their profile into the stratosphere. They were invited out to the One Bite Pizza Fest in New York and our own Pizza City Fest every time they have been held. They routinely end up on “best of” lists of pizzerias in the Chicagoland area, but I think with a little more media savvy they could easily have a national profile.

It can get crowded on weekends but the local crowd generally comes early, so tables are easier to come by after 7pm.

It’s gonna take you a while to drive out there anyway, so take your time and you will be rewarded with some of the best pizza around, and the best example I can come up with for why deep dish should be in the running for True Chicago Style pizza.

And, if it isn’t obvious by now, Uncle Jerry’s earns the inaugural:

Uncle Jerry’s Pizza Company
133 W Main St, Cary IL 60013
(224) 888-8663
Tue-Thur 4-9, Fri-Sat 11-10, Sun 11-8
Closed on Mondays

OK, I can feel it already - what the hell is with the subtitle, suburb boy? And I get it - Chicago is, in many ways, the quintessential American city. Big enough to have it all, on the shores of a freshwater ocean, with a friendly Midwest vibe that can accommodate everything from world-class symphonies and museums to neighborhood block parties to house, hip-hop, jazz, soul and industrial music. You don’t have to sell me on the place.

But… as great as Chicago’s pizza scene is, our Metropolis does lag their Gotham in one way. We don’t have a slice culture. In New York, pizza is as ubiquitous and as natural as a hot dog is here - even more so, as Chicago honestly doesn’t have a hot dog stand on every corner, but it’s hard to walk more than a block in New York without passing a slice shop.

This is a crying shame, not only because we don’t have easy access to a slice of pizza whenever we want one, but because it leads to a two-tiered system among the slice shops we do have. We either have truly outstanding places (like Zaza’s, Professor Pizza, Paulie Gee’s Wicker Park, Pizza Dada’s and Jimmy’s Pizza Cafe) or places that are just OK and are more about filling an empty spot in your stomach cheaply (but not that cheaply - the typical pizza slice in Chicago is more expensive than in New York) than excellence.

Today, I’m going to highlight that dichotomy with reviews of three newish pizzerias slinging slices out of postage-stamp venues - two of them only have window service and the third has room for maybe four tables. And we’ll introduce two more tiers on our five-tier Pizza Lab map. (Last issue debuted Neighborhood Gem for Sid’s Pizza Calabrese in Blue Island).

Chomp Pizza

The Setting

Nestled inside the CTA’s 18th Street Pink Line Station in Pilsen you’ll find Chomp Pizza, a small walk-up pizzeria and labor of love for its owner Travis Hezel. You’ll find him here 65-70 hours a week making dough, doing prep, preparing for the day and making and selling slices for hungry commuters. It’s an amazingly compact operation - room for a PizzaMaster electric oven, some prep areas, a two-pizza display counter and a small ordering window. Even if Travis is busy making the next pies, he can’t go too far, so ordering is easy.

As it’s basically just an opening inside the vestibule of the station, there’s no seating - it’s a grab-and-go, eat while you walk kind of spot. Travis makes 12 pizzas a day (no more, no less, no room) - he’s open from 9am on weekdays and noon on the weekends until he sells out. As I’d heard good things, I made sure to come in the early afternoon on Saturday so I could snag a slice or two.

The Slices

The only pizza on the menu at Chomp is New York style - the plain cheese slice, with the occasional special. But you don’t really need a lot of options when you have a slice this good.

The slice is perfectly baked to my tastes - it has good lift in the lacy cornicione, a bottom crust with little bits of char and that two layer structure - a thin crispy bottom layer with a soft and supple interior - that is the hallmark of a great New York slice. You can do “the fold” and you hear that little bit of snap. If you open the cornicione, you smell the fermentation of the dough and a hit of wheat.

The sauce is simple and bright: good tomatoes and a little salt with some Calabrian oregano sprinkled on top. The cheese is high quality and put on with a light but not stingy hand - on a slice like this, balance is important. Too much sauce and the slice flops, too much cheese and it tastes stodgy and sits heavy in the stomach.

I originally ordered just one slice but I very quickly ordered another. You make room when you encounter a slice like this.

The Story

I ended up spending about an hour chatting with Travis about his journey to owning this little slice of life. He started out on the bread baking side of things before joining the team at Paulie Gee’s Wicker Park location and learning the pizza game. (We both love the Red Pie there, a fantastic pie designed by executive chef and partner Tony Dezutter that consists of his special East Coast sauce and a little grated cheese that is criminally underappreciated by our fair city.) We also talked about our mutual love of the late Travis Heitkamp, the former head pizza maker at Paulie Gee’s Logan Square and the originator of the New York slice program there during COVID. We miss you every day, brother.

Eventually, he looked for an opportunity closer to home and when this little spot inside the train station opened up just blocks from his home in Pilsen, he took the leap. He spent months setting up the space and working on his own recipe, the details of which he freely shares with fellow pizza nerds.

Travis creates a high hydration (80%) dough with a blend of flours and using a poolish that he makes the night before. In the poolish, he’s using high strength locally milled Janie’s Mill High Protein Bread Flour and an equal weight of water plus 1% yeast and an 18-hour rise to develop deep flavor - the source of those fermentation notes and the wheatiness you taste in the crust.

The next day he finishes the dough by adding King Arthur Sir Galahad flour, a malted all-purpose flour that provides more food for the yeast and prevents the crust from being too tough, along with all but 300g of the water. After a mix and brief autolyse, he adds the rest of the water along with the salt - a total of 3% salt which really enhances the flavor of the crust - before balling the dough and letting it cold ferment in the fridge for three days. It’s that combination of flours, long fermentation and salt that give him that delicious crisp but supple crust.

The sauce is a combination of Jersey Fresh and Stanislaus 7/11 tomatoes and a little salt - that’s it - and then a sprinkle of Calabrian oregano as he’s building the pie. Cheese is Grande Mozzarella.

He goes for a five-minute bake in a 650° oven. Because of that extended fermentation, there is a lot of activity in the dough, so the cornicione rises beautifully and has a very open, webby crumb. You also get some bubbles and the dark spots associated with them. But remember - proper levels of char equal flavor and when your pizza is crust, cheese and sauce having each element shine is important. There is nothing to hide behind.

The Verdict

I love what Travis is doing at Chomp Pizza. He has a vision of what he wants his pizza to be: delicious but approachable food, served to a community he obviously loves. He talked a lot about Pilsen and the multiple offers he’s received to relocate, expand and cash in on an excellent product. But he seems happy with the life he has built: working with his hands, seeing people smile when they take a bite and giving back to the neighborhood he loves. Getting bigger means more management, more partners, more business development and more pressure to grow or die. Why trade this for that?

And so Chomp Pizza and Travis earn the first:

Chomp Pizza
1710 W 18th St, Chicago, IL 60608
Mon-Fri 9-5, Sat-Sun 12-4 or when they run out

Kung Fu Pizza Bar

On the opposite side of town and at the opposite end of the scale, let’s take a trip up to West Town near the intersections of Milwaukee and Ashland Avenues and Division Street to check out Kung Fu Pizza Bar.

The first thing you’ll notice about Kung Fu Pizza is that it’s literally a window along the street. The space was obviously some sort of bar in the past but something has gone terribly wrong with the building - part of what may have been a single space is now walled off from the building corner (which is now seemingly being rebuilt and filled with construction debris). If you peek into the window, you’ll see the fixtures of what was once a nicer spot, filled with Japanese toys (a Godzilla mask, a giant Pikachu Pez dispenser, robot figurines) and some pizza paraphernalia, along with some cans of imported Flora Food Products Pomodori Italian Peeled Tomatoes in Tomato Puree.

The windows have been papered (plasticked?) over with empty Kung Fu noodle wrappers, some more toys and a SLICES sign. A sign in the window tells you to knock loudly on the window for service, that they only serve cheese and pepperoni pizza slices - the Mutt and Jeff pairing of New York style and deep dish - and to stop asking for sausage because they don’t have it.

After banging the window, no one arrived or said anything, so I banged more loudly. A curmudgeonly fella showed up and just looked at me, so I ordered two pepperoni slices and he disappeared. A long time later, he showed up with a box, asked for $5, took it and disappeared back inside. The sum total of our interactions was about 15 seconds.

But hey - if the pizza is great, you can overlook the service, right? And honestly, the pizza looked very well baked - the crust was deeply golden, the pepperonis had crisped up and slightly curled on the rebake and the place has four stars on Yelp, so…

Well - I figure those reviews are mostly from folks who are looking for something to soak up the alcohol after a hard night drinking at the local bars and people who really need a $2.50 slice of pizza. Again, the bake looked great but the crust is obviously baked on a pan (look at the little circular light spots from the perforated pan), it has no flavor or lift and was quite floppy (that side shot took some careful folding). It tasted like a same-day dough with no yeast or fermentation flavor - underwhelming commercial white bread. You’d think imported tomatoes would make for a good sauce but it was underseasoned. The top was a little greasy from the plentiful cheese but the pepperoni was crisp if not amazing.

Look, we all can appreciate some cheap late-night drunk pizza every once in a while. The fact that it’s served out of a window by a guy who maybe doesn’t want to deal with half the people who come to his place, surrounded by noodle bags and toys, gives it real character. I love that places like this exist - our city could use some weird and this delivers that in spades.

But if you’re just talking pizza, this is firmly the camp of:

Kung Fu Pizza Bar
1225 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60642
Tue-Thur 6-11PM, Fri-Sat 6-Midnight

A Pizza Pie

A little further north along Milwaukee Avenue in Uptown, you’ll find the largest of our three counter shops, the pint-sized A Pizza Pie.

This is the pizza-centered offshoot of the nearby Ragadan, a burger and falafel joint that is just a few doors down. They are serving the kind of puffy American-style pizzas that Americans order by the millions from big chains and regional mom-and-pops all over the country.

They sell whole pies and slices, with a long list of toppings and specialty pies available as whole pies or, depending on the day, by the slice. Cheese, sausage and pepperoni slices are always available.

My son Liam and I walked up and ordered a bunch of slices (a few to take home for my son Quinn) and some drinks and sat at one of the small tables inside.

The place of honor on their menu goes to their homage to the neighborhood - the Uptown. It is topped with sausage, pepperoni and JP Graziano’s mild giardiniera.

A word about that giardiniera. I have the happy honor of knowing a goodly number of Chicago’s fine purveyors of our city’s treasured vegetable condiment. I would suspect a not-insignificant portion of the city gets most of their vegetable intake by eating giardiniera (I plead the fifth). And while I love them all, my personal favorite is from Graziano’s. It’s just so damned tasty! Theirs is a proper vegetable mix - along with the cauliflower, carrots, celery and peppers (green and red bell with added serranos for the hot), they also add whole green olives which sends it over the top for me. Their hot muffaletta mix (a finely chopped version of their hot giard with a little more vinegar) is in my refrigerator every day of the year.

A Pizza Pie is paying the upcharge for the Partanna Olive Oil version of the giardiniera, so you can tell that they care about the quality of their ingredients. The sausage, too, was quite good - but seemingly quite different from the sausage found on their normal sausage slice. It was slightly pink, placed in larger chunks and juicier. I don’t know if it was purely due to the size of the pieces and how they cooked, but the sausage on the Uptown was head and shoulders better.

In terms of sauce, I didn’t have the chance to ask but it tasted to me like a Stanislaus product with a little salt - solid and again good quality.

But even with great care taken with your choice of ingredients, you can still be let down by execution and this is where A Pizza Pie falls through. The crust was a bit of a mess - while the edge was nicely puffy and risen, it had no structure at all. I couldn’t even quickly take a side shot as it collapsed into a floppy mess. As such, there was no crisp either - even the ends, while dry, were mostly just nicely chewy. It was hard to eat and, unlike New York’s former Mayor Bill de Blasio, I’m not eating a New York slice with a fork.

The sausage slice was unremarkable - the sausage was slightly dried out and small. I didn’t have the pepperoni slice, but the pepperoni on my Uptown slice did have some crispy edges.

I had a brief opportunity to talk to one of the pizza makers. He was friendly and personable and rightfully proud of that special giardiniera - he said that they chose it because the olive oil really took it to another level and I agree. Unfortunately, it’s let down by the crust and the construction - I’d bump the hydration a bit (ironically, higher hydration dough often leads to crispier crust), increase the fermentation time through a longer cold ferment, a poolish or both and back off a bit on the cheese and giardiniera to give that crust more time to set and gain some structure.

I think with a few tweaks, the obvious love they have for their customers and their ingredients could elevate this spot into Neighborhood Gem territory, but as it is today, it finds itself on the upper end of:

A Pizza Pie
4449 N Broadway, Chicago, IL 60640
Tue-Thur 1-9PM, Fri-Sat 1-10PM, Sun 12-8PM

The Soapbox

I have lamented the fact that Chicago doesn’t have a slice culture for years. Chicago pizza culture has always been built around pizza as an inexpensive family meal or as a bar snack. And there’s nothing wrong with eating pizza as a meal with your friends and loved ones - quite the contrary!

But sometimes you just want to grab something quick - and good. And the only way to get something good is to build up enough of a community that demands it and is willing to pay for it. As I said, a $2.50 slice at 12AM can fill a need, but if you want to have truly excellent pizza available every day of the week during normal waking hours, you need to build that culture. In Chicago, we just don’t have it. Most slice shops are just filling bellies. But a newer generation of pizza makers is leaning into the art and craft of bread baking techniques and learning from their peers both in town and across the country. And that’s exciting.

Now it’s our turn to encourage that culture by supporting the pizza makers who are serving their communities and making the best slices they can.

Coda

Just as I was going to press, I met my son Liam for another Free Dad Dinner Tuesday on the very same block we were at last week, this time to try the burgers at Ragadan, a burger and falafel joint and sister restaurant to A Pizza Pie. I ordered the Oklahoma Onion Burger, a 1/4-pound patty fried on top of thinly shaved onion until caramelized and topped with American cheese and za’atar mayo while Liam ordered the double cheeseburger and onion rings (sadly, they were “sold out” of falafel as a side). That onion burger was freaking delicious. So while it’s not a pizza place and thus doesn’t count, I’m gonna cheat and say that earns Ragadan its own:

Ragadan
4409 N Broadway, Chicago, IL 60640
Tue-Sat 11-8PM

As a special treat for this Fourth of July weekend, this second issue of Pizza Lab is doing two things at once: introducing how reviews will work here and actually doing the thing you subscribed for, with a review of Sid’s Pizza Calabrese in Blue Island.

I believe a review should serve both you, my readers, and the pizzerias themselves. A reviewer who will only tell you how awesome everything is does readers a disservice. A reviewer who is uniformly negative just tears families and small businesses down.

I also think that trying to rank pizzas and pizzerias on a rigid scale is a pointless exercise - vagaries of a specific visit, personal preferences, even your mood mean you can never be that accurate.

So I’m not going to try. My reviews should give you a feel for the vibe of the pizzeria, the staff and the owners while going deep into what makes this pizza taste the way it does - the crust, the cheese, the toppings, the bake. I’ll try to break down what I think is contributing to the flavor, or lack thereof, of the slice.

But you do need to know my overall impression as well, so I’m breaking it down into five broad categories:

• Needs Work - for some reason, the pizza just doesn’t work. I will lay out the reasons why and offer some suggestions as to how it could improve.

• It’ll Do - this is workaday pizza. It’s not special and not really trying to be but it’ll feed you when you’re hungry, is often good value and is the result of hard work. Honestly, most places you ever visit will fall here - and that’s true of any kind of food, service or retail you frequent. Hard working people putting out solid effort.

• Neighborhood Gem - we all know this spot. That one place in town that does it right, where you take your guests when they visit. Every town should aspire to have a few Neighborhood Gems and this is what most pizzerias should aim for - to be the best for your community.

• Worth the Drive - now we’re cooking with gas (or driving with gas, but no shade if you’ve got an EV because I have one and they’re great). You take your first bite here and your eyes widen a little. This isn’t just good pizza, it’s great pizza. You’ll figure out how to get back here some future weekend even if it’s out of the way because it’s just… that… good.

• Destination Pizza - the Pizza Gods have smiled upon you and you’ve entered the Promised Land (actually, the Pizza Gods don’t really promise that much, but it sure is tasty). This is the pizza that makes you question if you really knew what pizza was, if someone had been playing an elaborate hoax on you your whole life and you’d actually been eating something secretly called “puzza.” This isn’t worth just a drive. You plan a whole trip around it.

A caveat, and a huge one - these are my impressions. I’m a quirky guy - can’t eat mushrooms (allergies), I like my bakes as dark as my sense of humor (ok, maybe not that dark, carbon being not that yummy) and I’m not as tied to any particular style of pizza as many folks are. As my friend Paulie Gee says, “No bests, only favorites.”

And with that, I’ve cleared my throat enough. It’s time to take a trip down to southwest suburban Blue Island, the kind of trip that makes you remember just how big Chicago is geographically as it sits on the city border yet it takes an hour to get to from just north of the city.

The Setting

Sid’s Pizza Calabrese is a newer pizzeria opened by Timmy Sids, the nom de pizza of a local Blue Island native, on Olde Western Avenue. It’s in the old downtown, by the tracks and the giant freight train bridge over the Little Calumet River.

Blue Island is a historic river community (on a National Register, no less) that at one time was the brick capital of Illinois, a working-class town that’s maybe a little down on its luck but working hard to revitalize. You see evidence of this everywhere you walk - beautiful old buildings, fresh new businesses but also more than its fair share of empty storefronts. I stopped at the Blue Island Beer Company (they had some homemade sodas I wanted to try - foreshadowing) and discovered that they would soon be closing for good (and did, in early June). Some sort of dispute with their landlord (the city of Blue Island itself) but that was sort of the feel of the place - struggling but working hard at the same time.

Timmy knows the community well - born and raised, he lives just a few blocks from his new spot, the former Jeben’s Hardware - which operated for over 100 years in the same location - and more recently a cafe. It’s a gorgeous building, made from local brick, with well-worn hardwood floors and a decorative ceiling. As you enter, you first notice how open it is - it still feels more like a coffee shop than a pizzeria. An old wooden dining table mixed among the more standard restaurant tables, a sideboard with a fancy lamp and a couple of deli cases, the checkout and a roped-off area leading to the kitchen in back, where Timmy and his crew work, cranking out as many as 120-140 pizzas a day.

I walked up to order and it seemed like everyone was either family or longtime friends. I got there at a weird time, around 2pm, so they didn’t have every slice available, but I managed to snag two of them - a sausage and a pepperoni.

The Slices

The pizzas at Sid’s are what Timmy calls “Sicilians baked in a Detroit pan” and I would dub “sheet pan pizza”, the kind a grandma from Calabria would teach her grandson to make when he was little.

My sausage slice was the stronger of the two slices. Timmy sources his sausage base from Russo but then hand blends in his own set of spices, including copious amounts of whole toasted fennel seeds that he sources from Natural Life Country Store, a small Amish supply shop in Fort Atkinson, WI.

The sausage is really good - I’m a sucker for fennel-forward sausage and Timmy is not being shy here. Placed on top of the cheese so it gets some browning and flavor development, it’s juicy, savory and excellent - I just wish there was more of it. I had eight dime-sized pieces on my 5.5” x 3.5” slice - if they were quarter-sized, I’d have no complaints. And from subsequent photos I’ve seen on social media, it looks like that has been addressed - more and bigger chunks on all the photos I’ve seen.

The dough here is a multi-day process. Timmy uses a blend of Caputo and King Arthur 00 flour and is doing about 70 percent hydration (for every 10 ounces of flour, 7 ounces of water by weight). Because he mixes the dough by hand, he can only make enough dough for 14 pizzas at a time, so he makes up to 10 batches a day. He mixes it into a shaggy mass, does a series of stretch and folds over the course of three hours and ends up with a big glossy ball of dough. By using just a tiny bit of yeast he can then do a long 24-36 hour room-temperature proof.

Once proofed, he takes the dough and presses it into lightly oiled pans, about 20 at a time. At that point, they are topped as orders come in and placed inside a convection oven to bake.

Timmy’s slices do come out a little blond - they are still crisp and, unlike a lot of pizzas baked in a pan, not a lick of oil on the bottom. The crust has a finer and denser crumb than a Detroit or traditional Sicilian. When you crack it open, you can definitely detect some yeastiness but it’s subtle. More like the clean smell of fresh white bakery bread than a heavily fermented sourdough. Maybe a little more salt could amplify the fermentation flavors that multi-day proof provides.

Even though Blue Island counts as the South Side, you’ll get no sweet sauce here. Instead, the fresh and bright tasting sauce - made from a blend of Stanislaus 7/11 and Bianco DiNapoli or Ciao DOP tomatoes - is lightly cooked with garlic, onion, olive oil, salt and Italian seasoning. Timmy says sauce should be cooked for less than 20 minutes or more than 4 hours, otherwise the tomatoes turn bitter. His outstanding looking meatball sandwiches get the long cooked sauce. It’s hard to argue with the results.

The mozzarella is Stella low-moisture and is spread across the surface and along the edge to give you a little bit of that frico edge that made Detroit pizza all the rage.

The Story

I talked to Timmy for nearly half an hour as I ate his pizza and discussed pizza making. His mom, a delight who I met working behind the counter, came over from Calabria in the 60s. Italians, he said, don’t do daycare, so he went to his grandparent’s house. It was there that he learned how to garden, how to make bread and focaccia and sheet pan pizza - sauce, tomatoes from the garden, a little bit of parmigiana.

During COVID, like a lot of folks, he started making pizza again. By 2021, he was doing pop-ups on Saturday nights in a local tavern, making 30 pizzas a night. Eventually, pop-ups at Marz Brewing in Bridgeport (home to a number of great pizza pop-ups, including longtime favorites Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream/Kim’s Uncle Pizza/Pizz’Amici) and Thursday nights at the cafe in Jeben’s Hardware store. When the cafe closed, Timmy saw his chance to have a home base in his hometown, took over the lease and set up shop. He’s trying to figure out a way to collaborate with other spots in town - Jerry’s, the BBQ joint across the street, and Natural Law with those “a little bit salty” burgers using the seasoned salt that he loves. Maybe do a “food war” where each spot has to come up with a menu item featuring a theme ingredient. Lots of ideas to engage the community. Considering he was selling 120 pizzas a day a few weeks after opening, I’d say he’s tapped into what his community wants.

The Verdict

All in all, a very solid pie. If I lived in Blue Island, this is where I’d get pizza on Friday night. Combined with that story and his obvious love for his community, this spot definitely is a:

Sid’s Pizza Calabrese
13311 Olde Western Ave
Blue Island, IL 60406
(708) 972-7269
Open Thurs-Fri 3-9PM
Sat 12-9PM Sun 12-6PM

As I made my way out from Blue Island, I took a walk along the river, passing by an old school that later became the bottling plant for “The Famous Orange Squeeze,” a local treat created by William Roll in the early 1900s. As has too often become the case, the age of big bottlers and national brands squeezed out “The Famous Orange Squeeze” - it lives on only in memories and antique soda bottles. I might look for one of those old bottles - I love those old regional sodas and their stories, but that is a tale for another day.

Blue Island, like America itself, has changed a lot since its founding. Both have been shaped again and again by the people who came next: Germans and Irish, Italians from Calabria and Mexicans from next door. They weren’t always welcome - they spoke strange languages and ate strange food. But one of those strange new foods, pizza, became as American as the Italians who called this new country home.

Happy Birthday, America. Here’s to 250 more.

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Pizza is one of those things you can obsess over in many different ways. For some, it’s a quest for that perfect bite, what Steve Dolinsky calls OBR: Optimal Bite Ratio.

For others, it’s the pursuit of baking that perfect pie: dialing in hydration, blending flours, sourcing the best toppings and honing techniques over months and years, all leading to that perfect bake.

And others see pizza as a community, where bakers and eaters and bemused family members get to know and support one another.

As for me, it’s all of the above. I’m Brian Erst, a software developer by day, pizza obsessive by night. Pizza Lab is where I get to share that obsession with you.

Pizza has always been part of my life. My earliest food memories are of birthdays at Shakey’s Pizza, when, as a member of the Birthday Club, I could get my very own pizza my way (cheese and Canadian bacon - don’t judge me, I was 4!) and eat it myself. And baking homemade sheet pan pizzas with my mom using Pastorelli’s Pizza Sauce and hand-grated Chellino scamorza. And yes, crust from a box - again, I was 4!

About 20 years ago, I started reading Slice, the pizza blog started by Adam Kuban and part of the Serious Eats family. Slice was a special little community. This was back when the blogosphere was a thing and comment sections were lively and nurtured.

The posts on various pizzerias and pizza news brought out us commenters, but the seminal event was the launch of My Pie Mondays. This was an opportunity to show off your own pizza-making skills - a page full of pictures sent in by the Slice community with little blurbs about each. We’d ask each other about recipes and techniques down in the comments and ooh and ahh over various delicious-looking pizzas.

I started sending pictures of my own pizzas - originally Detroit-style. These days, Detroit-style is everywhere, but in 2009 it was very much still a Detroit thing, so as a guy in Chicago, if I wanted to try it I had to make it myself. I got the pans (blue steel - honestly, terrible pans and I soon upgraded to Lloyd Pans) and invented a recipe out of not much more than some hints and some basic bread baking knowledge. The very first pies (after I got rid of the disastrous blue steel pans) came out amazing. I’m not sure if it was serendipity or just the luck of being somewhat obsessed with Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread technique but I stumbled my way into a recipe that worked right off the bat.

And I wasn’t the only one. You may recognize some of the other commenters - pizzeria owners Paulie Gee in Brooklyn and Derrick Tung in the Chicago area, Dennis Lee (a staff writer there) of The Party Cut and Food is Stupid newsletters. Some you will only know if you were as into pizza as we were - Norma Knepp, who won the Caputo Cup for best pizza and competed on Chopped, Anthony Falco - then Tonycalzone, now a world traveling pizza consultant - PizzaHacker and more.

Once I lock onto a hobby, I get a little nutty (just wait til you see what else is coming to Pizza Lab). I backed the first Baking Steel and Uuni (now Ooni) Kickstarters, bought a Breville Pizzaiolo, chased every style I could figure out, switched to natural starter when things got too easy, and eventually bought a MockMill so I could start milling my own flour. I own so many pans.

Along the way, as I got to know folks who now owned pizzerias, I became interested in that side of the story - not to become a pizzeria owner myself but to understand that business and in my own way help support these small business people. It really started with Derrick Tung, owner of Paulie Gee’s Logan Square and Wicker Park and the new Alley Cat bar, Dennis Lee who was working at Derrick’s to supplement his writing income and Anthony Scardino, aka Professor Pizza, who was a member of the opening staff there. We started doing little pizza crawls, checking out the other pizzerias around Chicago to see what they were doing.

Through these crawls, I got to know a whole bunch of pizzeria owners and makers. And I would strike up conversations wherever I went. I’m a curious guy and as I met new pizzeria owners, I started to see patterns of early struggles - sometimes it was issues with vendors, sometimes with staffing, occasionally with the pizzas themselves. By this point, I knew just enough to be helpful - if I knew that another pizzeria owner had had a similar issue, I would try to connect them so they could help each other out.

And that’s pretty much how my role as “Chicago’s Pizza Mascot” was born (although Tony Troiano of J.B. Alberto’s in Rogers Park recently christened me Chicago’s Pizza Ambassador while we were at Pizza Expo in Las Vegas, so maybe I’ll use that). I’m trying to build a welcoming pizza community in Chicago and beyond.

I’ve been most active on Instagram - posting regularly about pizzerias I’ve visited or pizzas I’m making (I try to leave the recipe in the comments). Not a huge following, but a high-quality one: pizzeria owners from across the world and people who just like to see some guy from Chicago try his hand at making a Philly-style tomato pie. Which are amazing, by the way.

That Instagram has also led me into some fun projects - Flout Pizza, a pizzeria in Belfast, Ireland, reached out to me to help them with learning how to make a cold-cured tavern-style pizza. A few back-and-forth sessions and I see them post pictures of their first pies on their Instagram - and calling me out in the caption! I’ve since gone on to help a number of pizzerias with recipe ideas or tweaks and I’m always available to give advice and honest feedback.

For many years, my friends have been telling me to do more real writing - Instagram posts are fine but a few thousand characters isn’t a lot to work with. I dipped my toes in the water by guest writing three parts of a promised five-part series on Chicago pizza styles for Dennis Lee’s The Party Cut newsletter (sorry, Dennis) and writing a recipe-slash-essay called “Lazy Squares” for John Carruthers’ Pizza for Everyone community cookbook.

That’s why I’m launching Pizza Lab. It’s starting as a newsletter but will grow into something more. In the newsletter, I will be writing a few different kinds of pieces:

• Reviews of new and established pizzerias

• Recipes and recipe development

• Deep dives into pizza styles, history and science

• Interviews and stories from people in pizza

In terms of reviews, these will be a little different than my Instagram reviews. I go into a pizzeria with hope in my heart and generosity of spirit, but I will be evaluating fairly and giving my real opinions. I will go into the details of crust, sauce, cheese, toppings, baking technique and execution, flavor, ambiance and whatever details I know about how they make their pizza. When possible, I will talk to the pizzeria owner or maker and learn about their process and story. My hope is to highlight the positive and give constructive feedback when needed.

There will be no arbitrary numbering scale or strict rankings. What you will get is some insight on how to assess a pizza, if you want that, but also a sense of just how enjoyable it is - and, hopefully, tell a good story along the way.

I’m also looking forward to sharing how to make lots of different styles of pizzas and the process of developing recipes. I am constantly inspired by the pizzas I eat and the ones I see on Instagram or YouTube - there is a wide world of pizza out there and you can make it yourself. You can expect to see “Lazy Squares” make an appearance soon.

The most fun pieces for me will be the ones exploring the science and history of pizza in all its different styles. My series on Chicago’s indigenous pizza styles (there are five of them) will make an appearance (and be finished - sorry again, Dennis) as well as stories about how pizza has evolved in Chicago and the world over time.

Finally, what really motivates me are the stories. Chicago has so many amazing pizza makers and their stories deserve to be heard. Sometimes those stories will be woven into a review while at other times I will just let you Meet the Pizza Makers.

The current plan is to publish biweekly and rotate between reviews, recipes, deep dives and interviews. This first issue is the outlier: a little bit about me, so future issues can let the pizza and the stories shine.

And we won't wait long. Later this week, we head down to southwest suburban Blue Island to meet a pizza maker doing sheet-pan pies in an old hardware store.

See you soon.