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Pizzeria Uno
Pizzeria Uno is where the Chicago deep-dish story is usually said to begin: in 1943, Ike Sewell — a Texas-born former college football player working in Chicago as a liquor company sales manager — is credited with developing the original deep-dish pizza at a small spot on East Ohio Street. The pizza he built was deliberately dramatic: a buttery crust with tall, pie-like edges, packed with more cheese than most diners had ever seen on a pizza, combined with authentic Italian spices and quality tomatoes, then baked for nearly an hour. The historical record is genuinely murkier than the popular version of the story suggests — Chicago's official cultural historian has said there isn't enough documentation to say with total certainty who invented deep-dish pizza, and some accounts credit original pizza chef Rudy Malnati (whose family name would later become famous in its own right at Lou Malnati's) as much as Sewell himself. Whatever the exact credit split, Pizzeria Uno is where the style was first served to the public at scale, and Sewell opened a second location, Pizzeria Due, one block away in 1955 to keep up with demand. Uno has since grown into a national chain restaurant brand, but the original Chicago location has stayed the touchstone — the place people mean when they talk about tasting deep-dish "where it started," regardless of how the underlying credit for inventing it actually shakes out. The dispute over Sewell versus Malnati's exact contribution is, in a way, part of the story worth knowing rather than a detail to gloss over — it's a reminder that Chicago deep-dish wasn't invented by a single genius in a single moment the way food origin stories often get simplified, but emerged from a small kitchen where multiple people were experimenting together. Whatever the precise credit split, Rudy Malnati's own family would go on to build one of the style's other defining names decades later, which makes Pizzeria Uno something like the shared root of two of Chicago's most famous pizza lineages at once. Sewell didn't set out to invent deep-dish at all — by most accounts he originally wanted to open a Mexican restaurant with his partner, Ric Riccardo, a World War II veteran, and the pizza concept emerged only after early recipe attempts didn't work out the way they'd planned. The Rudy Malnati connection is more complicated than the popular version of the story suggests, too: contemporary records indicate Malnati didn't join the restaurant as a chef until February 1951, becoming its third manager roughly eight years after Uno first opened its doors — a timeline that undercuts any claim he was there inventing the recipe from day one, even as some 1950s newspaper accounts credited him with creating it. Sewell himself, in a 1977 interview, downplayed his own belief in the deep-dish concept specifically, saying instead that what he'd believed in was his partner Riccardo — a more modest account of the restaurant's founding than the confident origin myth that's grown up around it since. For a Chicago pizza list, Pizzeria Uno is the essential "the original, disputed as it may be" entry — the 1943 birthplace of Chicago deep-dish pizza, still serving the buttery, tall-crust style that Ike Sewell (and possibly Rudy Malnati) built the entire genre around.
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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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