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Gino's East
Gino's East was founded in 1966 by two taxi drivers, Sam Levine and Fred Bartoli, along with their friend George Loverde — an origin story that's genuinely unusual for a restaurant that's become one of the most recognized deep-dish names outside Chicago. The original location served deep-dish pizza at 162 E. Superior Street, a block off the Magnificent Mile, continuously from 1966 until 2000, when the building was torn down due to structural issues; Gino's returned to the same site in a new building in June 2006. The restaurant's most visually distinctive feature has nothing to do with the pizza itself: the walls are covered, floor to ceiling, in decades of customer graffiti — signatures, doodles, declarations of love, scrawled by generations of diners. What started as damage control for a different kind of vandalism became the restaurant's signature aesthetic, and the walls are now treated as a kind of living archive rather than something to paint over. The pizza itself sticks to the classic deep-dish format — a thick, buttery crust, a generous layer of mozzarella, and chunky tomato sauce poured over the top rather than underneath — the same basic structure most Chicago deep-dish tourism is built around, executed at a scale that's made Gino's one of the most nationally recognized names in the style, alongside Uno and Lou Malnati's. The 2000 teardown-and-rebuild is a detail worth sitting with, because it's a rarer outcome than it sounds: plenty of Chicago institutions that lose their original building simply don't come back, or come back somewhere else entirely, quietly severing the connection to their origin story. Gino's spent six years working to return to the exact same Superior Street footprint rather than relocating to a cheaper or more convenient spot, and the graffiti tradition on the new walls picked back up as though the gap never happened — customers started signing the replacement building almost immediately, treating continuity of place as non-negotiable even though continuity of the actual physical walls wasn't possible. That's part of why the brand has traveled well nationally: the identity was never really about one irreplaceable building, it was about a ritual anyone could restart. For a Chicago pizza list, Gino's East is the essential "graffiti walls and classic deep-dish" entry — a Magnificent Mile institution since 1966, where the walls are as much a tourist draw as the pizza, and both have stayed consistent enough to matter for six decades.
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Vito & Nick's
Vito & Nick's traces back to 1923, when Sicilian immigrants Vito and Mary Barraco opened their first tavern at Congress and Polk. Vito moved the business to 80th and Halsted in 1932, calling it Vito's Tavern, then relocated again in 1939 to 79th and Carpenter, adding eight restaurant tables and a bar serving Italian sandwiches, sausage, and beef alongside drinks — a tavern first, a restaurant second, for its first two decades. Pizza wasn't part of the business at all until 1946, when Vito's son Nick — freshly discharged from the Army Air Force after World War II — joined the family business and, with his mother's help, started making pizzas. That pizza program is what the family has been refining ever since, and it's specifically credited with popularizing Chicago's ultra-thin, cracker-crust pizza style — a genuinely different tradition from the deep-dish pizza the city is more internationally famous for. The restaurant has been at its current Southwest Side location, 84th and Pulaski, for decades, and in 2020 celebrated 100 years of the Barraco family being in the tavern and restaurant business in Chicago — a rare multi-generational run that predates the deep-dish style entirely, since the family was serving Italian tavern food more than two decades before Nick ever made a pizza. That pre-pizza history matters for understanding why the tavern-style crust turned out the way it did: Vito & Nick's wasn't founded as a pizza restaurant trying to invent a signature dish, it was a working-class Southwest Side tavern that added a fast, shareable, bar-friendly food item almost as an afterthought in 1946, and the cracker-thin, cut-into-squares format is a direct product of that context — built to be eaten standing at a bar with a beer in hand, not sliced and folded the way a New York-style wedge is. That practical, no-frills origin is precisely what tavern-style pizza fans point to as more "authentically Chicago" than the tourist-facing deep-dish spots downtown, since it grew organically out of neighborhood bar culture rather than being built from the start as a signature dish. For a Chicago pizza list, Vito & Nick's is the essential "the OTHER Chicago pizza tradition" entry — a hundred-year-old Sicilian family tavern whose ultra-thin, cracker-crust "tavern-style" pizza is the direct counterpoint to every deep-dish name on this list, and the place most credited with making that thin-crust style a genuine Chicago tradition in its own right.
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