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Pequod's Pizza
Pequod's traces back to 1963, when Burt Katz first started making a deep pan pizza with a caramelized cheese crust at a spot called The Inferno. He refined the recipe further after opening Pequod's itself in 1971 in suburban Morton Grove — the restaurant's name is a nod to the whaling ship in Moby Dick. Katz sold the business to Keith Jackson in 1986, and the Chicago city location on Clybourn Avenue, the one most people mean when they say "Pequod's" today, opened in 1992. The caramelized crust is the whole identity of the place, and Pequod's is notably careful about the vocabulary — the menu calls it "pan pizza," deliberately avoiding the term "deep dish" even though it's built in the same style of pan. The signature move is a blackened halo of crisp, caramelized cheese ringing the top edge of the crust, achieved by layering cheese slices along the pan's edge beneath the toppings so it chars against the hot metal during baking. It's a genuinely different eating experience from a standard deep-dish slice — that crust edge is often what people specifically order the pizza for. That reputation isn't just local anymore: Yelp ranked Pequod's the #1 pizza in the entire country on its most recent nationwide list, a notable distinction for a pizza style that's often polarizing outside Chicago, and the restaurant picked up further national attention after being featured in the TV series The Bear. Sixty-plus years of continuous refinement across three owners and two locations — Katz's original Morton Grove spot and Jackson's Clybourn Avenue expansion — is a genuinely long development arc for a single signature technique. Most restaurants chasing a viral "best pizza in America" moment are working with recipes that are a few years old at most; Pequod's caramelized crust has had six decades to get exactly right, and the current national ranking reads less like a sudden discovery and more like overdue recognition for a technique that's been quietly excellent the whole time. Burt Katz's path to Pequod's ran through several restaurants before he ever opened one under that name: he started at the Inferno in Evanston in 1963, founded Gulliver's on Howard Street in 1965, and only reached Morton Grove and the Pequod's name around 1970 or 1971 — accounts from Katz himself have varied on the exact year. After selling Pequod's to Keith Jackson in the mid-1980s, Katz wasn't done refining the recipe: he opened Burt's Place a block from the original Pequod's location in 1989 and ran it until 2015, a year before his death in 2016, continuing to work the same caramelized-crust technique into his final years in the business. The Bear's season-two feature — where a fine-dining chef fancifully re-plates a Pequod's pie for tasting-menu guests — drove a measurable spike in business afterward, with the restaurant's general manager describing crowds that kept growing for roughly two weeks before customers started specifically mentioning the show as the reason they'd come. For a Chicago pizza list, Pequod's is the essential "the crust is the point" entry — a caramelized-edge pan pizza with a recipe dating back to 1963, recently validated as the country's top-ranked pizza by Yelp's national list, still served from the same Clybourn Avenue storefront it's occupied since 1992.
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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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