Chicago is the city this guide is most likely to get wrong, and the reason is that the famous thing is not the everyday thing. Deep dish is what the world orders and what the tourist photographs; local writers and the city's own delivery data say tavern-style - thin, crisp, cut into squares - is what Chicagoans actually eat. The guide records both, and the two oldest tavern houses in the set are still run by the founding families at their original South Side addresses. The deep dish story is also less settled than it looks: a historian working from primary sources contests who built the first one in 1943, and the record says so rather than repeating the version on the menu.
The building at Ohio and Wabash is where Chicago deep dish is dated to, in December 1943, and the restaurant still operates on the site as a historic landmark. Who actually created the recipe is genuinely contested rather than settled, and that dispute is itself part of what a record about this address should carry rather than smooth over.
Verified 2026-09-18
Pequod's is built entirely around one technique, a ring of mozzarella laid at the rim of the pan so it caramelizes against the metal as the pie bakes, credited by the business itself to the late Burt Katz. The Clybourn Ave address is the in-city location; the technique itself and the original restaurant both started in suburban Morton Grove, which is not this record.
Verified 2026-09-18
Lou Malnati's Buttercrust substitutes butter for oil in the dough, a specific, checkable departure the business states itself, and it carries its own thread into the city's contested deep-dish origin story: founder Lou Malnati was the son of Rudy Malnati Sr., one of the three people credited (and disputed) with inventing the dish at Pizzeria Uno. This record is for the River North location, inside the city; the company's original 1971 restaurant was in suburban Lincolnwood.
Verified 2026-09-18
Gino's East credits its dough, and a "secret dough conditioner" that it says still shapes the crust's texture, to one named cook, Alice Mae Redmond, who worked the ovens for 29 years after joining in 1966. The business's own account that she came from 17 years at a competing restaurant is suggestive of the same figure named in outside historical research as a mid-1940s modifier of Pizzeria Uno's dough, but that identity match is not confirmed by either source and is not asserted here as fact.
Verified 2026-09-18
One of the two families credited with originating Chicago's tavern-style pizza — a thin, cracker-style, square-cut pie that is the pizza most Chicagoans actually eat, in contrast to deep dish's tourist reputation. The original South Side corner still operates as a family business, now in its fourth generation.
Verified 2026-09-18
The other of the two families most often credited with originating Chicago tavern-style pizza. The Barraco family has run it as a tavern since the 1920s and, by the business's own account, Nick Barraco began making the thin, square-cut pizza in 1946 with a dough recipe the family still will not disclose.
Verified 2026-09-18
