but in all seriousness, to anyone who think I’m a Chicago snob, I agree with
@SDBoiler1 that pizza on the east coast just has to be better. Also, I find Chicago pizza opinion to be absolutely terrible.
Freddy’s pizza was one of four places on the pizza show on the Chicago episode, and you won’t even find it on a top FIFTY list in Chicago. Bartolini’s got best spaghetti and meatballs in America .. their owners are making the sauce and dough from scratch every day.. same, never got top 50.
what will get top 25? Any pizza place opened up by a chef named Carl or Cecily in a gentrified neighborhood in Chicago. I went to a supposedly top 10 place in the city and it was absolutely awful, bob’s in Pilsen. And people on the internet were like “yeah forget about the sauce, there’s beer in the dough!”
Chicago can’t complain to New York or new haven for two reasons
1) there is no lineage to Italy. Italians came here, but pizza didn’t really take off in Chicago until post world war 2 when vets came back from Europe .. where as in New York, Italians came here and began doing what they were doing in Italy modifying only for availability of ingredients.
2) the pizzas in Chicago in the 1940s and beyond were crafted with externalities in mind.. like keeping drunks drinking at bars .. it wasn’t pizza for the sake of pizza, it was “let’s change it to make it more like peanuts.”
so I don’t want anyone thinking that despite my sheer hatred for pizza king .. I think Chicago is like the Mecca of pizza. It’s not