June 12, 2021
Bloomington, IN
The 2020 list had a lot of new additions. Because of the pandemic, it has been pretty hard to travel to any of these new ones. We took advantage of the boys staying at their grandparent’s for a week and decided to do a mini road trip – reminiscent of our original road trip back in 2016. This time, we only made it as far as Chicago, but got to try a lot of the newer pizzerias that have made the list in the years since we started this journey.
Our first stop was Mother Bear’s, in Indiana. Bloomington is not a town we would have visited for any other reason, although it was a nice little college town. The pizza place had a college vibe, too, with wooden tables and walls that have been covered in messages and signatures over the years.
This place has been around since 1973, and it even ended up on People Magazine’s top 9 pizzas in the country in the 80’s.
We tried a large ‘Soul sizzler’ with chicken, mushrooms and sriracha, and a small 6″ veggie, and walked across the street to the university to eat them. We tried not to step on the millions of cicadas underfoot on our brief walk. This almost reminded us of Pizza Hut style – full of cheese with those crispy cheese edges – or kind of like a thinner Detroit style but in a regular round pan. It wasn’t the type of pizza we eat often, and I’m not sure we’d come again to Indiana to have it.
Since this is probably the first pizza we’ve had in Indiana, I can’t say if it really is the best in the state. If we went to college here, I’m sure we would have been fans, and I imagine that it gets pretty busy. Not sure it was list-worthy, but it is nice to see the 101 branching out into some new states.
To visit:
Mother Bear’s Pizza
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