When New York Pizza Became Better than Chicago Pizza
My dad, born and raised in Chicago, moved to Florida when his mother became ill. All 3 of his children were born and raised in Florida. He instilled these truths in his Floridian children: 1) lollipops are to be called suckers, Cubs fans are not, 2) Vienna beef hot dogs with fluorescent green relish in poppy seed buns are the best (unless you’re the vegetarian daughter writing this), and 3) Chicago deep-dish is the #1 ranked pizza forever.
My experiences with deep-dish pizza were mostly during family trips to Chicago with an occasional visit to an Uno chain restaurant in another city. We went to Giordano’s or Lou Malnati’s, and they’d bring out the pies with thick, flaky crusts, what seemed like five pounds of cheese per slice, and tomato sauce generously poured on top. They took half an hour to make, but the wait was worth it. I loved the pizza and sharing part of my dad’s past.
In 2007, I moved from Florida for a year-long internship in Chicago. Deep-dish pizza was no longer a rarity, but a default meal whenever I met up with friends to go to The Second City, the architectural boat tour, or a movie. The meaning of the pizza took another surprising transformation that year. Part of my internship focused on providing therapy to people with eating disorders. That meant hearing about Chicago-style pizza in contexts like parents desperately trying to nourish their underweight children and their children resisting it like poison because of a fear of getting fat. It meant hearing about people going out with their friends, deeply distressed and struggling to “eat normally — like everyone else.” It meant lonely people ordering pies for themselves and eating until they felt sick, disgusted, and ashamed. But it also meant helping people to work through those issues in treatment so that they could enjoy the city’s amazing pizza again — like I did, growing up with my dad.
I finished my internship in 2008 and moved to North Dakota, better known for its hot dish than its deep dish. But staying in the Midwest meant even more access to deep-dish pizza than my internship year granted, and consequently, more loosening of associations with childhood memories. Continually adding more Chicago pizza memories to the mix made those earlier ones shrink into smaller parts of an expanding mental map.
In 2018, my dad went to Manhattan for work, and my sister and I met him there. We arrived with an ambitious agenda to figure out how to 1) change the direction of our careers (which we would go on to do) and 2) see and do tons of things during our 5-day stay (most of which we would not go on to do). On the last night of the trip, I arrived at my hotel around 9 and ordered pizza for dinner.
Due to a series of location misunderstandings and ordering mishaps on my end, the pizza didn’t arrive until 11, and when it did, it was perfect: the thin crust, the sauce, the melty cheese on top. Still, I wasn’t ready to say it outranked Chicago pizza at that point. There were some factors that may have unduly influenced my judgment: I was in an exceptionally good mood from a fun and meaningful trip, and I was super-hungry.
The true pizza test would take place when I returned to New York in 2019 for an eating disorder conference. I arrived at LaGuardia Airport feeling nervous about my upcoming career changes and excited to see friends, family, and colleagues. This time, I ate the pizza on the first day of the trip in a restaurant with a normal hunger level, so confounding variables weren’t an issue. The crust was about 1/5 the thickness of a typical Chicago-style pizza, which meant I could eat more than 1 or 2 pieces without feeling anchored down by the enormous density of it all. The tomato sauce was evenly spread on the crust instead of piled on the top like a pot of tomato soup. Then, there was the cheese – thoughtfully placed over the sauce instead of shoved into a thick crust.
That was it. That was the pizza that pushed Chicago deep-dish out of the #1 spot and confirmed what I had suspected in 2018 – New York pizza is actually better. Maybe it’s the ingredients or style or maybe it’s just that New York pizza now evokes more vivid, positive memories than Chicago pizza (that second trip to New York ended up being pretty wonderful too). I broke the rank-changing news to my dad, hoping he would accept it as long as I remembered what he’d said about Cubs fans.
Chicago vs. New York pizza is yet another “baked vs. fried” debate where the baked people claim the aesthetic upper hand.
But we all know that baked potato chips aren’t as good as the fried ones, don’t we?Report
Heh, I think its different compared to different. That is, having grown up in Chicago I know “Chicago Style Pizza” is its own thing… everything else is just something else… just Pizza. Once I accepted this, I could go to “Pizza” parties and remain friends with the muggles.
You can only compare Chicago Style vs. Chicago Style with any hope of speaking the same language of virtues.
Comparing Chicago Style to plain old Pizza is just a Platonic category error… New York pizza is what people in the cave try to make viewing only the shadows of the True and Eternal Form of Chicago Style Pizza — that’s why NYP is so 2 dimensional and flat.
So it depends on whether one’s critique is Aristotelian or Platonic which aesthetic arguments to deploy.Report
There is no better way to state this than Marchmaine has.
Really, deep dish is what tourists believe to be Chicago pizza. True Chicago pizza can only be had at your neighborhood pizzeria, and is never deep dish.
New York pizza is tomato sauce and cheese on a cracker.Report
I’m tired of the NY-Chicago pizza wars. If someone put a gun to my head and said there was going to be only one kind of pizza in the world and it was my job to decide, sorry, Chicago, I go with New York. But nobody is making me do that. I enjoy Chicago-style pizza as a change of pace, and am glad it exists. Eat. Enjoy. It’s not a zero-sum game.Report
A Chicago “pizza” is not a pizza. It is a casserole.Report
A divinely ordered casserole we call Pizza.Report
A New York pizza is just cheese on a cracker with a little tomato sauce.Report