There wasn’t much in the way of National Pizza Day specials besides a plethora of generic percentage off deals from the usual chain restaurants. One of the fascinating things in doing this is that I’m now paying attention to the business side of pizza in a way I absolutely never paid attention to before, so there are certain things I’ve always assumed — like that National Pizza Day would be a big deal on a local scale — that I’m now realizing I couldn’t have been more off about (FYI, admitting you’re wrong is important to sustaining relationships and personal growth).
It also didn’t help that NPD was in the shadow of the Super Bowl, which is the biggest pizza day of the year, and also Valentine’s Day, which has somehow gotten shoehorned into the middle of everything because apparently everyone wants to take a crack at baking a heart shaped pie (personal note to Big Marketing, there’s nothing romantic about the way I eat pizza).
In case anyone had any issues letting your valentine (or would be valentine) know exactly how you feel, I’ve got you covered for next year:
Or, if you feel like heading in the complete opposite direction, maybe Pizza Hut will bring back their ‘Goodbye Pie’ promotion, wherein they’ll send your significant other a pizza and break up with them for you in the process.
The promo was available this year in the three cities that Pizza Hut deemed to be most notorious for heartbreak; Chicago, New York, and Miami. And it was only available at one location per city, with the ‘Hut at California and North Avenue serving as the local pizza angel of Valentine’s death.
I’m torn about the promo as, again, admitting your mistakes. It’s important! But also, it’s kind of hard to argue with the notion that everyone should immediately get a pizza when someone else breaks up with them.
It makes me incredibly happy that for the second consecutive newsletter I’m able to write about an additional location for one of Chicago’s best and hardest working pizza makers.
After talking about Milly’s new location in Berwyn in the previous Slinging Dough, this news officially dropped last week:
Professor Pizza will be taking over the Old Town location of Roots Pizza at 1610 N. Wells, right next to Second City, with an eye toward opening by the end of April. Tony has been cooking out of a tiny kitchen at the West Loop rooftop bar Tetto, so the fact he’ll have his own full sized kitchen now should give him plenty of motivation as he looks to build out his menu with pasta, sandwiches, and appetizers.
The Professor typically offers four different styles; tavern, New York, Detroit, and a Grandma — and I would expect that they’re all coming with him. I was finally able to make it to Tetto last summer to try Professor Pizza for the first time, and the New York was some of my favorite pizza I ate all year.
Anyone who follows Tony on Instagram knows he’s been making pizzas for comedians touring through Chicago for some time now, and word is there might even be some sort of collaboration with Second City in the future.
This is the second Roots that’s closed in the last three months, as they shut down their Lincoln Square outpost last November, and it sounds like they’ve had an especially hard time rebounding after COVID shutdowns. They have two remaining locations, in West Town and the South Loop, that will continue to serve their Quad Cities-style pizza and giant mozzarella sticks.
I met up with Mike from Mr. B’s Peppy Pies (named partially in honor of his dog, Pepper) at Spiteful Brewing a few weeks back, where he was kind enough to bring me two of his pizzas to try, and a third to take home for my kids.
Mike is a dedicated pizza man, and might be one of the most prolific home bakers in the entire city (he’s cooking up something new and cool just about every day). He does pizza drops on his Instagram, and donates the proceeds to the Chicago Abortion Fund.
Mike made me a tavern with sausage and Giardiniera, and a Detroit with pepperoni, and they were both fantastic. My kids also destroyed the cheese pizza he made for them in about 17 seconds flat.
We tossed around some ideas for a bigger post in the future, but in the meantime, be sure to give Mike a follow to keep track of all the awesome things he’s up to.
Curious what some of Chicago’s food all-stars would bring to a Super Bowl party? Well, my friends, wonder no more. WGN talked to some of their favorite guests from their ‘Chicago’s Very Own Eats’ podcast series, which includes Bill Jacobs from Piece, Billy Z, and John Carruthers, to name a few.
Sticking on those three gentlemen for a moment…
Fox 32 Chicago recently did a wonderful feature about Billy and all of his efforts to raise funds and awareness for MDA research.
And he’s also teaching a pizza class on Friday, March 1st at the Schoolhouse cooking school in Portage Park! I am absolutely going (and writing about it), and as of right now there are still a few tickets available right here.
You can also see Billy this Monday (2/26) when he Voltrons his pizza powers together with John as they turn Half Acre (2050 W. Balmoral) into a slice shop from 5-9 p.m. All the proceeds will go to Friendship Center Chicago, and John will have a few more special guests chipping in. They’ll be selling slices from five different pizzas that are all completely vegan.
And Piece’s ‘Slice to Meet You’ campaign continues, with Chef Stephanie Izard’s specialty ‘Savory Sausage Spicy Situation’ pizza available from now until March 8th.
The pizza features pork and shrimp sausage from Girl & the Goat on Piece’s white pie, and it’s topped with caramelized onions, banana peppers, jalapeños, and finished with lime-chili seasoning.
Each specialty pizza is $35 and when you purchase one PAWS Chicago will receive a $50 donation in return.
THE story in the Chicago pizza community for the last week or so is that Pequod’s was recently named the best pizza in the entire country in a survey put together by something called the Yelp Elite Squad — which is apparently comprised of reviewers that have to be both nominated and vetted by the crowdsourced business review site.
Yelp ranked businesses by considering total volume and number of five-star reviews that were written by Yelp Elite Squad members for restaurants in the “pizza” category.
Five other Chicago pizzerias made the Top 100 list: Piece Brewery and Pizzeria in Wicker Park came in at No. 17; Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Company in Lincoln Park was ranked No. 27; Spacca Napoli in Ravenswood was No. 44; Calo Pizzeria in Andersonville was No. 91 and Coalfire Pizza in West Town came in at No. 98.
Between 2022 and 2023, Chicago-style pizza searches rose 18% in searches according to Yelp, signaling an increased craving for the iconic pizza form from Yelpers.
I’ve talked about it multiple times on here, but Pequod’s has exploded in popularity over the last few years, and recently a lot of that has to do with The Bear. It’s become the most popular pizza destination for anyone who visits Chicago these days, and I can’t imagine that’s going to change anytime soon.
Big congratulations also to Piece, CPaOG, Spacca Napoli, Calo, and Coalfire. I just had Coalfire for the first time a few weeks back, and I’ll have a lot more to say about that soon.
I will never get enough of stories like this.
When J.R. Escobar heard that his favorite pizza place was closing, Pizzeria DeVille in downtown Libertyville (404 N. Milwaukee), he decided he was going to buy it instead — along with all of its original recipes.
Escobar is a Grayslake resident with decades of experience in restaurant operations, starting as a teenage dishwasher at a chicken place in Round Lake Heights. He managed a Dunkin' in Round Lake after high school before moving to the Pizza Hut in town.
He stayed with the company for 23 years, moving up in management to oversee 11 Pizza Hut locations in Lake and McHenry counties. He left in 2019 to help open new Cafe Zupas locations in northern Illinois.
Like many in the industry, Escobar was laid off during the coronavirus pandemic. He resurfaced in 2021 at Crumbl Cookies, assisting in the opening of seven locations in the Milwaukee area before leaving recently to pursue “my lifetime dream of owning my own restaurant.”
How can you not root for J.R.? Guess I’m just going to have to go to Great America this summer and stop by Pizzeria DeVille on the way back.
Pizzeria DeVille has recently reopened after some long needed updates. They’re ready and waiting to take your order.
Someone recently asked this question on Reddit:
For anyone who doesn’t know, the bags (and pizza boxes) with that logo were created and are sold by a company called Battaglia Foods in Pilsen. Battaglia was founded all the way back in 1902, by a Sicilian immigrant named Agostino Battaglia.
Anyone who grew up in the Chicagoland area is no doubt familiar with the bags, but in talking to pizza people from other parts of the country, I’ve learned it’s a pretty divisive topic overall (p.s. they’re all wrong).
Battaglia currently sells them for 3.5 cents per bag when you buy them by the thousand. And this user absolutely nailed it:
A few weeks back I mentioned that I think ‘deep dish’ is becoming too much of a catch-all term these days. A new article just popped up at Tasting Table that lists a few ways to identify some of the differences between deep dish pizza and stuffed.
A Brighton Park pizza spot that started out as a 400 square foot beef stand, but is now a 17,000 square foot restaurant and sports complex, called Lacoco’s recently celebrated their 40th anniversary.
I’m firmly of the opinion that there needs to be a lot more 400 square foot beef stands in Chicago again. And more specifically, one of them should be in my backyard.
Weird connection, but I can still get there; an article at Women’s Wear Daily talked to a bunch of native Italian businesspeople that travel to Chicago every year for the Chicago Collective trade show and asked them to pick some of their favorite “hot spots” in the city.
My new Italian best friend is Gennaro Sannino, who not only picked Robert’s Pizza and Dough as his favorite pizza, but also shouted out Scooter’s Frozen Custard as well. I may or may not have gone to Scooter’s three separate times in a single day last summer (I did and I can’t wait to do it again).
Siamo fratelli di un'altra madre, Gennaro!
Long Beach, California is near and dear to my heart for a multitude of reasons. My wife and I lived there for a few years, and it’s also where my oldest spent the first year of his life.
I started following a Long Beach shop called Speak Cheezy and not only does their pizza look incredible, but they recently announced something very interesting:
They’ve modified their cheese pizza so that they’re now finishing it with additional freshly shredded cold cheese on top.
The cold cheese slice has been a thing in New York state for quite a while now, and it’s said to have originated at Tino’s Pizza in Oneonta, New York in the 1980s when owner Tino Garufi decided to finish off his hot from the oven slices with a large mound of cold cheese to cool it down so that the local, drunken college kids would stop burning the roofs of their mouths.
I’ve never had a cold cheese slice, but I will be in Southern California at the end of March. I’m hopeful I’ll have enough time to swing by Speak Cheezy to not only try some of their pizza, but to also take some pictures and hit them up with a few questions as well.
If you’re shaking your head at the cold cheese slice, don’t ever go to Pittsburgh for pizza. There’s a restaurant there called Beto’s that started a tradition of serving their slices with all of the toppings added after the bake — meaning the dough and sauce are hot, but everything else is not (though any meat or perishable option has definitely been cooked at some point prior).
While that sounds completely insane to me, my best friend lived in Pittsburgh for a year and said it’s, “not nearly as bad as you think it’s going to be.” Well, I will never, ever know. Fries on a sandwich I can get behind. Cold toppings layered on cheese that is also cold is a (yellow!) bridge too far.
Not Chicago, but still pizza (and apparently, academia):
A recent study conducted by Home Run Inn aimed to figure out which U.S. cities are the most pizza obsessed. New York and Chicago, right? Not even in the top five! The top three are all on the West Coast, with Seattle coming in at No. 1.
A real estate company called Clever put together a huge data set to come up with all kinds of fancy pizza stats (as in the stats are fancy, not necessarily the pizza). They say that Denver is America’s best city for pizza, Richmond, Virginia serves the most affordable pizza, and Buffalo, New York has an average of 17.8 pizza restaurants for every 100,00 people (Buffalo’s current population is 276,807 people, by the way). Check out the study for even more interesting pizza focused facts and figures.
CNN tried to dig into food science to figure out why pizza is so addictive.
Scott Wiener dropped a post on his blog that gets into the crazy story of the origins of the stuffed crust pizza, which focuses on a man named Anthony Mongiello who not only filed a patent for it (which you can read in its entirety right here), but subsequently also sued Pizza Hut for $1 billion dollars for violating it.
And I don’t know whether or not to root for them to eat the slices afterward:
Not pizza, but still cool:
Chicago Mag just dropped their Power 50 list of the most influential people in Chicago. I’m not at all surprised that J.B. is at the top, and the ranking itself is a stark reminder that there is an entirely different world that exists within the city that we know and love that most of us will never be a part of.
Sticking with Chicago Mag, they also just put out a profile of Fabio Gottlicher, who founded a transit advocacy group called Commuters Take Action that’s attempting to force the CTA to start dealing with the deterioration in the quality of service that’s become even more apparent after COVID. Gottlicher is a software engineer who built a program that tracks all live CTA trains 24 hours a day, and the data he shares is both extremely significant and incredibly worrisome.
How about we end this section on a note that’s a little bit more fun:
I’m going beef sandwiches, a random warm day in the winter (even if it feels slightly redundant these days), Chicago flag, drives along Lake Shore, and tavern-style.
And finally, sometimes you spend hours trying to think up a clever bio for your pizza newsletter only to one day see a random internet comment that somehow encapsulates exactly what you were going for in a way you were never able to achieve:
Have a nice weekend, everyone! And eat lots of pizza.