Ask someone outside Chicago about Chicago pizza and they’ll describe deep dish. Ask in Chicago and you may hear that deep dish is for tourists and the real local pizza is thin, crisp and cut into squares. Both pizzas are genuinely Chicago’s, along with a third that often gets lumped in with deep dish. Here’s how they differ, and how much of the local-versus-tourist story is true.
Three pizzas, not two
Who actually eats what
The “deep dish is for tourists” line is popular, but Modernist Pizza points out that Gino’s East, Giordano’s and Lou Malnati’s all have many branches in the neighborhoods and suburbs. Malnati’s told the authors that in downtown Chicago, its sales run about 70% deep dish to 30% thin crust, and in the neighborhoods closer to 50/50. In other words, about half of its neighborhood customers order deep dish.
The story has some history behind it. For its first two decades, deep dish was available only at Pizzeria Uno and its sister restaurant Pizzeria Due, under the same owners, and it was considered a downtown thing; the suburbs, the book says, were all about thin crust. That’s no longer the case.
These figures are one chain’s, as told to the authors, not a survey of the city. They’re enough to retire the idea that Chicagoans don’t eat deep dish, but not to say exactly how the city splits.
Deep dish
Where it came from
The restaurant that became Pizzeria Uno opened in 1943 as The Pizzeria, owned by Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo. Sewell told the story for decades, but Modernist Pizza argues that the dish most likely owes its success to Alice Mae Redmond, an African American cook who made Uno’s dough for years. She told the Chicago Tribune she reworked the crust because it was too hard to push into the pan. She went on to cook at Gino’s East, which opened in 1966. Lou Malnati’s, founded in 1971 by a son of Uno’s manager, followed.
Two kinds of crust
Modernist Pizza found that Chicago’s deep-dish crusts fall into two types:
- Pie-crust style (Uno’s). A yeast-raised dough with plenty of oil or shortening and some corn element, whether cornmeal, corn flour or corn oil. It’s yellowish, has the consistency of Play-Doh and is pressed into the pan. The authors compare it to a Southern pie dough.
- White-bread style (Burt Katz). A white, pillowy dough more like sandwich bread, which Katz developed at Pequod’s, which he opened in 1971, and later served at Burt’s Place. He packed extra cheese around the edge of the pan, where it caramelizes into a crisp rim. Anthony Bourdain later called Burt’s the only deep-dish pizza he ever loved.
How it’s built
Deep dish is assembled upside down: crust pressed up the sides of a tall round pan, cheese on the bottom, fillings in the middle (in Chicago, usually plenty of sausage) and a thick layer of tomato sauce on top. Modernist Pizza prefers this cheese-first order for deep-dish pizza: it keeps the crust from getting soggy and protects the cheese through a long bake.
They’re big. A Chicago pizzeria told the authors a deep dish might carry two pounds each of dough, cheese and sausage, plus sauce, with a single slice weighing about a pound.
The gummy layer
The common flaw is the gel layer: a pale, gummy band of underbaked dough between the crust and the wet topping. Modernist Pizza found it in many deep-dish slices in Chicago. In an experiment with 120 pizzas, the authors concluded that the only way to eliminate it completely is to prebake the crust, and they recommend parbaking deep dish, while noting that for reasons they don’t understand, parbaking is considered a no-no in Chicago. Putting the cheese on first and keeping the toppings in check help too.
Stuffed pizza
Stuffed pizza is a 1970s variation: deep dish with a second, thin crust laid over the cheese and fillings and the sauce spread on top of that. Giordano’s, founded in 1974 by brothers Efren and Joseph Boglio, specializes in it and credits an Easter pie made by “Mama Giordano,” a story Modernist Pizza treats with some skepticism.
The design has a built-in problem. With sauce covering the top crust, Modernist Pizza says, there’s no way for it to bake properly, and it often comes out as a sheet of gummy, raw dough that diners mistake for cheese. In its own version, the book fixes this by putting the sauce under the top crust and scoring the dough.
Tavern-style thin crust
Chicago’s other pizza is thin, round, sauced and topped right to the edge, and cut into a grid of small squares: the tavern cut, also called the party cut. It’s the pizza of neighborhood bars and family pizzerias.
The origin story is that a bar gave pizza away to sell more drinks, cutting it into small squares so it would go further and topping it to the edge so every piece was the same. Vito & Nick’s in Chicago says it started the style in 1946. Modernist Pizza notes that nearly the same story is told about bars all over the Midwest and Northeast, that it couldn’t confirm any of them, and that the hard evidence it did find shows a St. Louis pizzeria, not a bar, cutting thin pizza into squares in 1945.
How thin is it? Less than the name suggests, sometimes. The Modernist Pizza team found some Chicago thin crusts only a little thinner than a New York pizza, and they don’t consider Chicago thin crust distinct from the bar pies found across the Midwest. They also found the toppings so generous at some places that the crust went soggy.
What Chicagoans call tavern-style, though, is meant to be crisp: a thin, cracker-like base that holds up to being picked up square by square.
One thing they share: not enough salt
Modernist Pizza found Chicago doughs, deep dish and thin, chronically low in salt, most noticeable in the thin crusts, where there’s less topping to hide it. Some places oversalted the sauce to compensate. In their own Chicago-style recipes, the authors raised the salt in the dough. If your home version tastes flat, the crust is the place to fix it, not the sauce.
Tavern-style at home
King Arthur Baking’s Chicago Tavern-Style Pizza is a good published method, and it’s quick to assemble once the dough is made:
- The dough is a small batch of all-purpose flour with cornmeal and cold butter rubbed in, a little sugar and very little yeast: 332 g in all, enough for two 12-inch pizzas at 166 g each.
- No rise. After a 30-minute rest, each piece is rolled out to 13 inches on a well-floured counter.
- Cure it. The rolled rounds are stacked on parchment, loosely covered and refrigerated for 8 to 12 hours, or up to 3 days, until they feel leathery but still pliable. The drying helps the crust bake up crackery.
- Top to the edge. Sauce right to the rim, then mozzarella and Parmigiano, raw Italian sausage pinched into small pieces, and drained giardiniera.
- Bake on a stone or steel on the center rack, preheated for at least an hour at 475°F (246°C), for 7 to 10 minutes, until the bottom and top are deeply browned and the edges crackery.
- Cut into 1½- to 2-inch squares.
Deep dish at home
King Arthur Baking’s Chicago-Style Deep Dish Pizza is written for an 11-inch deep-dish pan and takes about 2½ hours start to finish:
- Dough. A soft, enriched dough with butter, olive oil and a little yellow cornmeal, kneaded about 7 minutes in a mixer and left to rise until very puffy, about an hour.
- Pan. Oil the pan well, press the dough across the bottom and partway up the sides, rest it 20 minutes, then press it up the sides again.
- Layer. Shredded mozzarella first, then cooked sausage, then pizza sauce spread right over the top to cover them.
- Bake on the lower rack at 425°F (218°C) for 28 to 32 minutes, until bubbly and golden; if the crust is pale, move it to the upper rack for 4 to 6 minutes more.
- Unmold. Cool 2 minutes, lift the pizza out of the pan onto a rack so the crust stays crisp, sprinkle with Parmesan and rest 10 minutes before slicing.
If your deep dish comes out with a gummy layer, try a short parbake of the empty shell before filling, as Modernist Pizza recommends; King Arthur’s individual deep-dish variation parbakes the crusts for 10 minutes. The Pizza Doctor can help diagnose a soggy center.
More regional styles
Chicago isn’t the only city with a pizza of its own. Detroit-style is a square pan pizza with a caramelized cheese edge; New Haven apizza is thin, charred and famous for its clam pie; St. Louis-style is a very thin, square-cut pizza made with Provel cheese; and Old Forge and the Quad Cities have their own traditions too.
Sources
- Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1: pages 62–64 (Pizzeria Uno, Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo, Alice Mae Redmond, the spread of deep dish), page 104 (cheese-down assembly), pages 105–106 (bar and tavern pizza origin stories, Vito & Nick’s, St. Louis), pages 234–236 (Chicago: the Malnati’s sales ratio, the two crust types, stuffed pizza, thin crust, low salt, deep-dish size), pages 240–241 (Burt’s Place, Giordano’s, Gino’s East), page 243 (Pequod’s), page 245 (Uno’s crust and parbaking) and pages 370–371 (the gel layer and stuffed pizza’s top crust).
- King Arthur Baking, Chicago Tavern-Style Pizza, from The King Arthur Baking Company Book of Pizza: dough, curing, toppings, bake and cut. Checked October 14, 2026.
- King Arthur Baking, Chicago-Style Deep Dish Pizza: pan, dough, layering, bake and unmolding. Checked October 14, 2026.
- Lou Malnati’s, Nutritional Information: deep-dish slices counted as quarters of a small pizza and sixths of a medium. Checked October 14, 2026.
- Giordano’s, shipping site: its stuffed pizza shown with a wedge-shaped slice removed. Checked October 14, 2026.