Pizza Pizza Pizza
And so, inspired by the unplanned outdoor dining experience at a local pizzeria courtesy of an exploding power transformer (see previous entry), time to talk about something important: pizza.
Growing up, I have many fond memories of making pizza at home with my parents and Gauss. We used to make pizza dough from scratch in the rice cookpot, set it by the floor vents to gently rise (with a lid with a see-through window so we could come by every so often and see how far it grew), stretch it out on a cookie sheet and then top if off with a riot of toppings.
And then I went to the BS/MD program at Northwestern, in Chicago.
Now, my family already knew what "Chicago-style" pizza was. My older cousin Paul had done his MD work at Northwestern a few years before I came, had raved about Chicago style, had even brought stuffed spinach pizzas home to Ann Arbor for us all to try. My parents and Gauss and I had first eaten at a chain Pizzeria Uno's in Rochester, NY, and had immediately fallen in love with deep dish pizza.
What I hadn't realized was that the chain Uno's was simply an *imitation* of True Chicago Pizza. The *original* Uno's in Chicago's River North -- which I ate at my first weekend at Northwestern -- serves a substantially different -- and far better -- deep dish pizza. In addition, Uno's is just one of many competing Chicago Style pizza places, which Chicago residents debate the merits of with the fury usually reserved for religious conflicts and Big Ten sports rivalries. Gino's has it's partisans. Giordano's -- with it's branch just easy walking distance to Northwestern's campus -- was a favorite "get-away" lunch spot during summers otherwise spent eating ramen in rented roach-infested fraternity housing. Lou Malnati's - founded by the chef who actually created Pizzeria Uno's first deep dish pizza -- is Gauss and I's current favorite, and a Must Order every time I come up to Chicago to visit. Although, recently, I have heard rumors of a deep dish pizza place even *better* than Malnati's...
My family is a family of huge eaters, born of ridiculous metabolisms constantly requiring food for fuel. (Yesterday's breakfast before call was four cups of oatmeal. Dinner the day before was two quarts of rice and vegetables and fish.) Deep dish pizza, with it's thick, crunchy crusts, nearly a literal-inch thick deep layer of pure mozzarella and piles upon piles of toppings, thick tomato sauce rich with chunks of tomato -- *this* is the kind of food perfect for eaters like my family. This is food that's too heavy for regular paper plates. This is the kind of food which makes diet gurus whimper and cardiologists start thinking about the upholstery in their next Rolls Royce. This is the kind of food which makes a sixty-four ounce steak -- another Chicago favorite -- look positively lean and healthy. I've had the privilege, over my years of scientific and activist work, to eat in some of America's finest restaurants, from New Orleans to Waikiki. But if I got to pick one meal to eat before the Vogons demolish the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass, I'd have one more deep dish pizza from Lou Malnati's.
And then, I moved to St. Louis.
Now, St. Louis has many wonderful things. It has Wash U, one of the nation's top five NIH funded medical centers. It has the marvelous Barony of Three Rivers. It has the City Museum, as told in this happy story. It has Music Folk, as told in this happy tale.
But not all is good in St. Louis. There is, after all, St. Louis pizza.
Now, I understand many of my Calontiri friends actually enjoy St. Louis pizza. I treasure my friendship with these dear friends. But they are, with all due respect and great affection, clinically batshit fucking insane.
I have my own opinion regarding St. Louis style pizza. In my opinion, St. Louis style pizza is not good. It is the exact opposite of good. St. Louis style pizza is not just not good, it is an atrocity. It is a crime. It is a crime against pizza, a crime against food, a crime against all that is Right and Good. If Chicago Style Pizza is what they serve in heaven, St. Louis style pizza is what they serve in Hell, except Lucifer wouldn't want that shit a thousand leagues near Hell.
What's wrong with St. Louis pizza? St. Louis style pizza is like the Star Trek Dark Mirror version of Chicago Style Pizza. It is everything good about Chicago Style Pizza, but inverted and passed through a cosmic colon. Whereas Chicago style pizza is thick and hearty and could be used as a blunt trauma weapon, St. Louis style is paper thin and flimsy and an entire "pizza" could be rolled up into a single blob not that much larger than a single slice of properly done Chicago Style. Whereas Chicago Style has thick, crunchy crusts around the rim, St. Louis pizza doesn't even *have* crusts. Whereas Chicago style pizza can have more meat topping than an average sized steak, more vegetable toppings than your average salad, and a rich tomato sauce that still has chunks of honest-to-god tomato in it, St. Louis pizza has a smear of runny tomato "sauce" and a pathetic scattering of toppings.
And while Chicago Pizza has pounds of pure mozzarella cheese in chewy layers, with the occasional other pure cheese component, St. Louis pizza has -- okay, what the fuck is Provel, over? Provel? You literally can't even legally sell Provel as "cheese". You cannot legally call Provel on food packaging "cheese", since Provel fails to meet the official FDA standard for cheese. Provel is a "processed cheese", in the same category as American "cheese" and Velveta. Provel is not only an adulterated, factory processed and pasturized cheese food product, Provel doesn't even bother to contain mozzarella even as a component. Provel is a stewed, melted, and processed collection of provolone, swiss, cheddar, and other non-cheese ingredients. Putting cheddar and swiss on a pizza is already seriously suspect, although tolerable, had it been actual real cheese. No, Provel is a *processed* aglomeration, the end result of food factory manipulations leading to a plastic-wrapped off-white blob which St. Louis residents actually voluntarily put on food.
Provel is the sort of thing that makes cheese afficianados reach for a gun, either to shoot the Provel makers or shoot themselves. If you tried to give a Chicago resident Provel, they would first club you senseless with the rubbery brick of pseudo-cheese, and then throw you and the Provel into the Chicago River, except no Chicago resident would want to pollute their river and even if they did, the River would probably throw the shit back. The wikipedia article on Provel notes: "Although popular in the St. Louis area, Provel is rarely used elsewhere." If the entire rest of the fucking human race won't touch your food product, You're Doing It Wrong!
There are Chicago style pizza places in St. Louis. There are no St. Louis style pizza places in Chicago. There are, in fact, no St. Louis style pizza places *anywhere* except St. Louis. This should tell you everything you need to know, if my previous few paragraphs of rant hadn't made the point abundantly clear. Chicago style pizza is something you savor. St. Louis style pizza is something you inflict. People of sanity, when faced with the choice of eating St. Louis style pizza or skipping dinner... get in their cars and drive to Chicago.
That being said, apparently the best Chicago style pizza... is in St. Louis.
My curiosity was recently piqued by a bit of local news. A few years ago, a chef named Chris Sommers opened up a deep dish pizza place called Pi's here in St. Louis' Delmar Loop. Now, Mr. Sommers calls his pizza "San Francisco style", as he borrows the dough from the famous Little Star San Francisco pizzeria. But both the cornmeal containing crust and the deep-dish style directly trace their lineage to Chicago style pizza, and the glowing reviewed of Little Star all universally classify the product as a Chicago Deep Dish. Any way you slice it, good old-fashioned Chicago style deep dish pizza here in the heart of St. Louis; and Pi has shot up the St. Louis favorite lists.
This past fall, a staffer for a visitor coming through town ordered some pizzas from Pi's to be delivered to where they were staying. A few hours later, a surprised Mr. Sommers took a phone call directly from said visitor, who called it the best pizza he'd ever eaten. In fact, said visitor liked the pizza from Pi so much, he later invited Mr. Sommers to come bake some more pizzas this spring at his house.
The White House.
True story -- Barack Obama, while on a campaign swing through St. Louis, first tasted the pizzas from Pi when a staffer ordered them for the team. Senator Obama actually phoned Mr. Sommers that night to say how much he liked the pizzas. So much so that now-President Obama invited Mr. Sommers to come to the White House this past April to bake some more pizzas. (For the record, no taxpayer dollars were involved, as Mr. Sommers reports that he paid for his own airline ticket, paid for the ingredients, and stayed with the family of his girlfriend.)
Keep in mind that President Obama himself didn't just live in Chicago. He met his wife in Chicago, was married in Chicago, his children were born in Chicago. He was an Illinois State Senator from Chicago, a faculty member at the University of Chicago, and lived in Chicago while Senator from Illinois. It is reasonable that, like most Chicago residents, President Obama has had his fair share of Chicago style pizza. Not to mention surely having eaten pizza from coast to coast while on the campaign trail. So when a long-time Chicago resident likes a particular *St. Louis* Chicago-style pizzeria enough to specifically invite the chef to drop by the White House, well... that's got to be some amazing fucking pizza. Certainly worth a shot.
At the very least, it won't be St. Louis style pizza. ;-)