Koko Lists
Start a new list
Log in
Sign up
← New random battle
Koko Battle
Tap your pick.
Lou Malnati's
Lou Malnati's traces back to Rudy Malnati, who worked at Chicago's first deep-dish pizzeria in the 1940s — the same Pizzeria Uno lineage credited (alongside Ike Sewell) with inventing the style in the first place. His son Lou Malnati carried that hands-on deep-dish training forward, opening the first Lou Malnati's Pizzeria with his wife Jean in suburban Lincolnwood on March 17, 1971. Lou died of cancer in 1978, and the family has kept building on his recipe for more than five decades since — making Lou Malnati's the oldest continuously family-run name in Chicago pizza. The deep-dish recipe is the restaurant's primary claim to fame and the reason it's frequently cited alongside Uno, Gino's, and Giordano's as one of the handful of names that define the style nationally. Less well known outside Chicago: Lou Malnati's also bakes a cracker-crisp thin crust, a genuinely different product from the deep-dish the chain is known for, built for game nights and big tables where a full deep-dish commitment per person isn't practical — worth knowing if deep-dish isn't actually the specific style you're after despite the name recognition. The company is now headquartered in suburban Buffalo Grove and operates more than 60 locations across the Chicago area, including prominent spots in River North and on the Magnificent Mile, run today by the third and fourth generations of the Malnati family after sons Marc and Rick Malnati took over following their father's death. For a Chicago pizza list, Lou Malnati's is the essential "the deep-dish name with a thin-crust surprise" entry — five decades of family ownership tracing directly back to the style's founding generation, serving both the deep-dish it's famous for and a genuinely good cracker-thin alternative most visitors never think to ask about.
VS
Di Fara Pizza
Di Fara Pizza opened in 1965 in Midwood, Brooklyn, founded by Domenico "Dom" DeMarco, who had emigrated from the Province of Caserta, Italy, in 1959. DeMarco found the Avenue J storefront almost by accident — visiting on a recommendation, he found the corner bustling with foot traffic on a Saturday night and signed the lease on the spot. The name itself is a small tribute to that beginning: "Di" for DeMarco, "Fara" for his original partner Farina, a name DeMarco kept even after buying out that partnership in 1978. For decades, DeMarco made every single pizza himself, standing at the same spot behind the counter, hand-cutting basil with scissors directly onto each pie and finishing it with a specific, unhurried ritual that became as much a part of the restaurant's identity as the pizza itself — a level of personal, hands-on involvement that became genuinely rare as the restaurant's fame grew and wait times stretched into hours. That fame built slowly over decades rather than through any single viral moment, driven almost entirely by word of mouth among people willing to travel to a fairly out-of-the-way Midwood storefront and wait a genuinely long time for a pie made one at a time by one specific person. DeMarco passed away in 2022, and the restaurant has continued under his family since, carrying forward a recipe and process that spent nearly sixty years being made almost exclusively by its founder's own hands. For a New York pizza list, Di Fara is the essential "one man, one recipe, six decades" entry — proof that a genuinely great New York slice doesn't need a second location to matter.
Next battle
Full comparison
About Lou Malnati's
About Di Fara Pizza
Popular Battles
1984 vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
1 votes
Friends vs. Curb Your Enthusiasm
1 votes
Ideogram vs. Sora
1 votes
Navy Pier vs. Bishop Museum
1 votes
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree vs. Skittles
1 votes
George Carlin vs. Oprah Winfrey
1 votes
