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Sally's Apizza
Sally's Apizza opened in 1938 in New Haven's Wooster Street Italian neighborhood, founded by Salvatore "Sally" Consiglio, a nephew of Frank Pepe who'd learned the coal-fired apizza craft directly within his uncle's kitchen before opening his own competing restaurant just down the same street. That direct family lineage back to Pepe's has made the ongoing rivalry between Sally's and Frank Pepe's one of the most storied regional pizza debates in the entire country, with both restaurants sitting within easy walking distance of each other on Wooster Street and each maintaining fiercely loyal, generations-deep customer bases who consider the question of which is better a genuinely serious local debate. Sally's has maintained the same coal-fired oven tradition as its uncle-founded rival, and the restaurant's tomato pie and mozzarella-topped classics have earned their own dedicated national following, including celebrity fans and frequent inclusion on national "best pizza in America" rankings alongside Pepe's. Sally's Apizza's combination of its direct family lineage to the founder of New Haven apizza itself and its decades-long, still-active rivalry with Frank Pepe's just down the same street has made it one of the most historically layered pizza destinations in the country, inseparable from the broader story of how the New Haven style came to exist at all.
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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.
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