I was understandably overjoyed when my 2-year-old nephew, Ethan, recently helped my brother, Jon, and me consume a large deep-dish pan pizza. For my brother, sister, and me to have lived in such a place and not enjoyed the pizza would have been like the von Trapp children never having bounded through the Alps learning the pleasures of "Do Re Mi." I credit my family's location within the golden pizza triangle for my childhood chubbiness that, truth be told, extended well into high school. This approach to pizza would be unfamiliar to many New Yorkers, who are accustomed to a slice of dough and sauce so thin and tepid that it is all they can do not to confuse it with the soggy paper plate it came with. Vesuvius.Ĭhicago pizzamakers, almost all of them first- or second-generation Italian immigrants, build pizza like Chicago architects build their city - with gusto. It is ambitious: a risky blend of cheese and crust and sauce that often sweeps and soars like an elaborate Italian opera, but sometimes blows its top and tumbles to the plate like Mt. The pizza from each place had a distinct character, which brings me to an important overall point about Chicago pizza. Do so, and they will look at you as if you were Princess Grace.) (Note: Chicagoans do not call them pizza parlors. Looking back I now realize that we lived in the center of a golden pizza triangle, the three points of which each represented a wonderful pizza place. Growing up in one of the city's northern suburbs, my family ordered pizza about 1.5 times per week. When there is a movie to rent, or a rainy night to sit through (or just a night to sit through), there is a pizza to be ordered as surely as life is to be lived. Chicagoans rely on it to get them through surreal highway gridlock, extreme weather, and underachieving sports teams.Īfter a softball game in Grant Park, or a White Sox game on the South Side, everyone goes out for pizza. On a recent drive through a West Side neighborhood, I saw more gyro and hot-dog joints than stoplights.īut the city's top food is definitely pizza. Translated from the Pottowatomie, it means "wild onion."įood, mostly very heavy and meaty, seems to be everywhere in Chicago. It is no mistake that the word "Chicago" is food-related.
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