May 28th, 2016
Chicago, IL
We’ve got one more place to talk about in Chicago that we hit on our road trip last year. Our previous stop was at Coalfire, which was one of our favorites of the trip. We saved Lou Malnati’s for last, partly because the original location is slightly outside of town and we could hit it as we started our long drive back East.
The first Lou Malnati’s pizza was opened in Lincolnwood in 1971. Today, there are several locations for Lou Malnati’s, 49 to be exact, and it is probably one of the most well-known deep dish locations in the city, if not in the country. They also randomly have a couple of new locations in Arizona.
We were expecting the restaurant to only serve deep dish, but they actually serve thin crust pizza as well. We aren’t sure why people would try the thin crust, as the deep dish is obviously what they are famous for, but we understand that sometimes you need to switch it up. We went with a personal size cheese pie because we had a long drive ahead of us and more pizza to eat in a couple of hours.
The crust on this pizza wasn’t anything special, although it was still very different from the crusts on the pies at Pequod’s, Gino’s East, and Uno’s. It was probably most similar to Uno’s, because it didn’t have that yellow cornmeal flavor of Gino’s, or the cheese-y crust like Pequod’s. It was a thinner crust than Uno’s, though, and was less bland. We’d say it was probably our second favorite crust.
The crust is layered with a heavy coating of cheese, mozzarella of course, and then topped with a generous portion of sauce. We really liked the sauce here because it had a great flavor and maybe a touch more salt than the others. Overall, the combination of the sauce and the decent crust made this our second favorite deep dish in Chicago.
If we learned one thing from our time in Chicago, it’s that people have very strong opinions about which deep dish they think it is the best. When we mentioned the deep dish pizzas that we tried, about half of the time someone mentions another pizzeria that wasn’t on the 2015 list. We’re happy to see that most of these other pizzerias have made the subsequent lists, so we’ll be making a trip back to Chicago to try them all out.
We also learned on this road trip that one deep dish pizza per day is probably our limit. Even with our massive pizza stomachs. So in a way it was good that all of those other pizza places didn’t make it on to the 2015 list. We wouldn’t have been able to squeeze them all into this trip!
I’ll finish out our road trip posts in my second post this week. Then we’ll dive back in to some of the places we’ve been visiting lately that have made the new 2017 list.
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