Counter Culture
or: What Chicago Needs to Learn from New York
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:
