A Pizza for Each Season
Back from Chicago and some local pizza adventures so enjoy this quick pizza report.
A pizza newsletter hiatus in the middle of national pizza month?? Sometimes life gets a little too hectic and the pizza newsletter has to fall to the wayside. But here we are today and I have an assortment of pizza adventures to share with you from a trip to Chicago for the Chicago Marathon as well as a long weekend of solo parenting aided by pizza. I guess in some ways pizza is the other parent in this household.
Enjoy a couple of quick snapshots as I seek to restore the balance in my life.
Chicago Pizza Report
Pizza Lobo is a bar / restaurant in the Logan Square area of Chicago. They offer $1 slices with a special cocktail, rotating cast of slices and an expansive menu of speciality pizzas. They even off giardiniera as a topping. I got the personal pizza as well as a slice of the pizza with vodka sauce.
If you’re out grabbing some brews, the pizza is a nice companion. The personal plain pizza was soggy and a little sad. I don’t know if it’s made differently than their other pizzas, but it didn’t all mesh together. The cheese was trying to emancipate from the crust.
Would be interested in trying a whole pie cooked to order, but this is a good bookend on a night out to pad the stomach.
I grabbed a slice as I walked by Pie Eyed pizza. It was a good walking slice.
Chicago has a booming pizza scene that is trying to right the wrong of the Chicago deep dish pizza. The deep dish pizza is novelty that is slowly being phased out and replaced by more Chicago tavern style pizza.
Sometimes called cracker crust, this pizza is thin, almost no rise, and each restaurant offers a speciality pizza with giardanara and sausage. Famously served at bars to pair with an ice cold beer, there are more tavern style specific spots popping up. We visited the newest one in Chicago that happened to open that week: Dicey’s.
The pizza is flat, crispy and topped with about anything you can find in Chicago. We got a plain and a sausage and pepper situation. It was maybe a tad chewier than I’d expected - I thought it would have a stronger crunch, but there was a surprising amount of give.
The density was a little unsettling. I’m used to Sir Pizza which serves pizza in a similar way. Sir Pizza is light and airy so you can devour a whole pizza in one sitting. This fills the stomach up quickly, the small pieces stacking in your stomach like Tetris blocks waiting for a single line piece to clear the mess.
I failed to finish the Chicago Marathon due to an achilles injury the flared up ten miles into the race. Kind of a bust of a trip, but life goes on.
Back in Pittsburgh
Coming back from Chicago Christa handed the baton to me as she took off for San Diego. It was me and Charlie for four days and I think we had pizza five times. Here’s a couple of highlights.
Friends of ours moved closer to Mercurio’s and they recently declared that was their new local spot. After picking Charlie up from school on Thursday (and after we spent a half hour rolling down tricky hill), I took Charlie to Mercurio’s. There we ran into our friends, Micah and Arielle, and joined forces to wait for a table together.
Charlie was a little confused about Mercurio’s because Christa told her that they had ice cream inside the pizza shop. Charlie interpreted that as they had ice cream inside the pizza and was let down her dream combination did not come true.
The very next day Charlie and I borrowed the My Little Pony movie from the library and watched that while eating Spak Bros. You wouldn’t believe it, but these ponies came together to solve problems through the power of friendship and believing in one another.
The next day we went to a birthday party which, of course, featured pizza from a different set of brothers. That’s right: Gino Brothers. Gino brothers is the quintessential birthday party pizza. Light, efficient, pointed triangles that can feed dozens of kids.
The past two weeks I’ve enjoyed pizza in a flurry of different circumstances. Going out on the town, with a movie, meeting up with friends, birthday pizza, and pizza to treat emotional wounds. No matter what’s going on in life it’s a comfort to know that there’s a pizza there waiting to fill that space in your gut to make you feel complete again.
Pizza ya later!
-Dan Tallarico, Pizza Journalist