(WBBM NEWSRADIO) – Tavern-style pizza -- Chicago’s sometimes overlooked style of pizza -- is having a moment.
National media outlets recently have taken notice of Chicago’s thin-crust bona fides, and even local pizza connoisseurs are celebrating traditional tavern-style pizza and the gourmet variations that have emerged here.
It’s a somewhat surprising development, given that deep-dish or stuffed pizza for years overshadowed its shallower cousin.
Since this story was originally published, the New York Times included Bungalow by Middle Brow on its list of 22 of the Best Pizza Places in the United States.
For Chicago “Food Guy” media personality Steve Dolinsky, who has written tomes about pizza, traditional tavern-style can offer a great “Optimal Bite Ratio,” or OBR, if the pie isn’t cluttered with too many toppings. By contrast, he says, chomping into stuffed pizza can yield an overload of cheese or crust.
Chicago tavern-style pizza is believed to date back to the 1930s and 1940s, when neighborhood bars would cook pizza and cut them into squares for patrons to nibble as they ordered drinks to wash it down. Eventually, some of these taverns morphed into full-blown pizzerias that served the cross-cut delicacy, Dolinsky says.
“Tavern-style is really our style of pizza,” he tells the latest Looped In: Chicago podcast. “I think it’s catching on because people from Chicago have spread out around the country, and you’ve got people living in other parts of the country. I can get tavern-style now outside of Nashville.”
Chicago Tribune food critic Louisa Chu has been studying innovations of the form, which she calls “New Tavern Style.” Some of the best practitioners include Professor Pizza (corn meal mixed into the dough and whipped ricotta rosettes on top) and Bungalow by Middle Brow (razor-thin crust cut into extremely small pieces). Like Dolinsky, she also admires Pizza Matta, for its toppings and cheese.
“It starts off with a fundamental base layer,” she said of the variations out there. “And then we can literally have so many things that we can manipulate and change with it. And yet it still can be a really fine expression of technique.”
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