The deep rooted history of Chicago’s deep-dish pizza (2024)

Starting with an ancient culinary tradition carried overseas by Neapolitan immigrants, pizza has evolved into a Windy City icon.

Pizza in the United States is deeply embedded into the nation’s culinaryconsciousness, from thin crust in New York to wood fired in San Francisco.

But Chicago’s version took the concept in a much more indulgentdirection, filling a thick crust with inverted layers of cheese, meat and tomatoes,all of it creeping up the side of an oiled steel pan. Today, deep-dish pizza isas central to the Windy City as Wrigley Field.

By the 16th Century, modern-daypizza (from the Italian word pinsere,which means to pound or stamp – a reference to the flat dough) began to takeshape in the Italian city of Naples. The thriving port was home to throngs ofworking class residents who lived in dense neighbourhoods around the Bay ofNaples. Small rooms and cramped quarters meant most of their living was doneoutdoors, and people looked for food that was inexpensive and quick to eat. Bakedin a hot oven and sold street-side, paper-thin pizza became the quintessential farefor the Neapolitan poor. Tomatoes brought back by traders from the New Worldtopped the dough, along with an occasional smattering of anchovies, garlic orcheese.

Over the next decades, pizza grew in popularity, moving beyond Naplesand spreading across both the country and social strata. In the 17thCentury, Queen Maria Carolina d'Asburgo Lorena, wife of the then King ofNaples, Ferdinando IV, famously erected a pizza oven in their summer palace. In1889, Neapolitan pizza maker Raffaele Espisito created the infamous PizzaMargherita – a simple blend of tomatoes, mozzarella and basil – to honour theQueen of Italy, Margherita of Savoy, birthing one of the most classic pizzas todate.

Slice into a deep-dish pizza and your knife sinks through layers of meatand vegetables, thin tomato sauce, dense mozzarella cheese and finally, a resistantcracker-like crust. The cake-like pan is first coated in olive oil, then toppedwith a white and semolina flour dough mixture, which gets pressed against thedeep pan’s round bottom and edges. The olive oil slightly fries the doughduring the baking process, giving it a distinct golden crunch. Before hittingthe oven, a layer of sliced mozzarella is covered with vegetables and meats,typically Italian sausage, then topped with a sweet layer of crushed tomatoes.The inverted layers of ingredients prevent the cheese from burning, while themeat, vegetable, sauce and crust marry their flavours.

More like a savoury layer cake, Sewell and Riccardo achieved their dreamto create a pizza unlike any other. And Chicagoans bit (literally). Soon,deep-dish pizza was no longer considered an immigrant tradition, but aChicago-born icon.

Pizza is delivered dense and hot, with the server using the traditional“pan gripper”, an industrial-strength tong-meets-wrench tool used exclusively totransport the scalding deep-dish pizza pans. With a heavy spatula, pre-cutslices of weighty pizza are dished out. Intense layers of cheese and tomatosauce fill the pie-like crust, inches high, to the browned edges. This isundeniably a knife-and-fork affair. A few bites satiate, and though it istasty, it is not Chicago’s best. But people come here mostly for the tradition,not the world’s finest slice.

A particularly muddled detail involves one of Chicago’s most famouspizza families, the Malnatis. Adolpho “Rudy” Malnati, Sr – a one-time employee atPizzeria Uno – claimed that it was his spark of genius that created the recipe.He and Riccardo, according to the Malnati family, would hand out slices of PizzeriaUno’s deep-dish on Chicago street corners in the hopes that passersby wouldgive it a taste. Sewell, the Malnatis assert, came later. Records of eitherSewell or Riccardo making pizza, or even showing any ability in the kitchen arenoticeably absent, fuelling the claims.

According to the Malanti storyline, after Riccardo’s death, Rudy and hisson, Lou, co-managed Pizzeria Uno until Rudy Malnati, Sr also passed away. Loustruggled to find his place in the restaurant after being told he was anemployee, just like everyone else. Frustrated, he abandoned ship to open hisown restaurant in 1971: Lou Malnati’s Pizzeria in the NorthShore suburb of Lincolnwood.

The story does not end here, however. Lou Malnati had a half brother,Rudy Jr, who opened his own joint, Pizano’s, in 1991 in downtown Chicago. Awaiter at Pizano’s divulged that Rudy andLou’s mother, Donna Marie, gave Rudy Jr the original recipe developed by RudySr himself. So while Lou went off to Lincolnwood, Donna Marie spent her nightsin the kitchen rolling out dough from the secret recipe at Pizano’s. Who isusing the original recipe today remains a point of debate.

But Pizano’s is good. Really good. The restaurant, like many Chicago pizzaspots, is dim and its walls are covered in local paraphernalia: pictures of localbasketball legend Michael Jordan; stills from the iconic Chicago film, BluesBrothers; and signed headshots of the local Blackhawks hockey team.Red-and-white checked linens cover high tables and well-versed waiters spoutlong lists of local beers and handcrafted sodas.

Here, the crust is lighter, a brilliantly buttery piecrust with a goldencaramelised outer layer giving in to a flaky, crumbly interior. The crustcrawls high on the pizza pan but the filling, like at Lou’s, is modest and of quality.Slices of Wisconsin mozzarella are topped with a garlicky, yet subtly sweettomato sauce, and the fresh basil and homemade sausage pack a punch. It is, forall intents and purposes, a more refined deep-dish than the others, andultimately – at least for me – one of the most satisfying.