Koko Lists
Start a new list
Log in
Sign up
← New random battle
Koko Battle
Tap your pick.
Serious Pie
Serious Pie opened in 2006 in downtown Seattle, one of the many restaurants built by Tom Douglas, the chef and restaurateur who's become one of Seattle's most prominent hospitality figures over a career spanning multiple concepts across the city. Serious Pie has been described as arguably his most successful brand — a genuinely notable claim given how many restaurants Douglas has opened and closed over the years. The pizzas themselves are thin, wood-fired pies built around unconventional, ingredient-forward toppings rather than a standard red-sauce-and-cheese approach — clams, nettles, soft eggs, and truffle cheese have all shown up on the menu, alongside the well-regarded Yukon Gold potato pizza that's become one of the restaurant's signature orders. That willingness to treat pizza as a genuine chef's canvas, rather than a simplified crowd-pleaser, is what separates Serious Pie from more traditional pizzerias elsewhere on this list. Reviewers have consistently noted that the wait for a table can run long, with one local guide describing the food as "worth the potentially long wait" — a real trade-off for anyone visiting the downtown location expecting quick, casual pizza service rather than a genuine sit-down experience with a chef-driven menu behind it. Serious Pie has expanded to multiple Seattle neighborhoods over the years, including Ballard, Belltown, South Lake Union, and a location inside the Starbucks Reserve Roastery on Capitol Hill, along with an outpost in Kirkland's Village at Totem Lake that opened in 2021 — a genuinely wide footprint for a concept built around a single chef's specific, ingredient-driven pizza philosophy. For a Seattle pizza list, Serious Pie is the essential "pizza as chef's showcase" entry — Tom Douglas's wood-fired, ingredient-forward pizzeria, built around toppings like truffle cheese and Yukon Gold potato that most traditional pizza kitchens wouldn't attempt.
VS
Windy City Pie
Windy City Pie brought genuine Chicago-style pizza to Seattle's Phinney Ridge neighborhood, built around two distinct styles most of the rest of the city's pizza scene doesn't attempt: true deep-dish, with its tall, buttery crust and cheese-heavy layering, and Chicago's other, less internationally famous tradition, tavern-style thin-crust pizza cut into squares. Offering both under one roof signals a kitchen genuinely committed to Chicago pizza culture rather than borrowing just the more famous deep-dish half of it. That dual-style approach matters for anyone who actually knows Chicago pizza — plenty of transplant pizzerias around the country lean entirely on deep-dish because it's the more recognizable export, while skipping tavern-style entirely even though many Chicagoans consider it the more everyday, more authentically local of the two traditions. Windy City Pie's willingness to serve both suggests real firsthand knowledge of the style rather than a surface-level recreation. Deep-dish pizza is a genuine rarity in Seattle specifically — a city with its own strong, thin-crust-leaning pizza identity, built around wood-fired and Neapolitan traditions more than Midwestern casserole-style pies. Windy City Pie's decision to plant a dedicated Chicago-style kitchen here, rather than in a market already saturated with the style, has made it something of a destination for transplanted Midwesterners and curious Seattleites alike. The restaurant has built its following specifically among people seeking out something genuinely different from the wood-fired, thin-crust pizza that dominates most of the rest of the city's scene — a useful counterpoint on any Seattle pizza list that would otherwise be entirely thin-crust, and proof that there's real local demand for the Chicago tradition even this far from where it originated. For a Seattle pizza list, Windy City Pie is the essential "the one deep-dish option that's actually good" entry — a Phinney Ridge pizzeria serving true Chicago-style deep-dish and tavern-style thin crust in a city that otherwise runs almost entirely on wood-fired and Neapolitan traditions.
Next battle
Full comparison
About Serious Pie
About Windy City Pie
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
