The Pizza Issue

for no particular reason except that pizza is good

Last week, I read two fascinating articles about pizza. The first ran in The Atlantic in 1949 and introduces pizza to America’s educated middle classes. They not only didn’t know about pizza until then, but they needed The Atlantic to explain it to them! It’s entirely possible that pizza was well-known in Italian immigrant communities. Surely a few slumming Yalies had been to Sally’s in New Haven, CT (founded in 1938)?

Maybe not.

American pizza has lots of variations because of immigrants who came from different parts of Italy and who had access to different ingredients depending on where they landed in the United States. And, of course, people experimented!

Here’s my list of favorite Chicago pizza places, based on their style:

• Stuffed pizza: Giordano’s. Carmen’s of Evanston, where I worked in college, was a little better, but it closed ages ago.

• Pan/deep dish pizza: Now that Gulliver’s is closed, Lou Malnati’s with a butter crust, well done. Not the same as stuffed pizza.

• Thin crust: Aurelio’s in Homewood. Not all Aurelio’s locations use the same recipe, by the way, so you have to go to Homewood for the best stuff. Also, thin crust (also known as tavern style and party-cut) is the standard on the south side and south suburbs.

• Neapolitan: Spacca Napoli. Literally one of the best pizza places in the world.

• Madison style: Big G’s. This is similar to New York style but with a wider range of toppings to appeal to drunk Midwestern college kids. Get a slice of mac and cheese pizza with a slice of s’mores for dessert.

Pizza is fundamental to Chicago: immigrant food made new, in new ways, every day. The other fascinating pizza story that I read last week is about a project that teaches detainees at Cook County Jail how to make restaurant-quality pizza.

To keep with the theme, I decided to watch Mystic Pizza, a 1988 movie that I had never seen. It was the second movie with Julia Roberts in a lead role and the first movie that Matt Damon appeared in. It’s a coming-of-age story about three servers in a Connecticut pizza restaurant, and it explores how people take advantage of and benefit from each other, which are not the same things. It’s free on Tubi, which has a lot of 1980s movies.

Finally, I see people posting things on Threads about how they want a free pan pizza for reading books like they got in elementary school. One of the many wonderful things about being an adult is that you can buy all the pan pizza you want after reading as many books as you like. Go ahead and treat yourself.