Chicago is
Second city to none.
Search the pizza-city arguments and Chicago is always near the top, usually holding the sharpest knife. This is not boosterism. It’s the city making its case in crust.
Everything shifted in post-Prohibition Chicago. In 1943, Pizzeria Uno engineered deep dish: a tall-edged, buttery crust layered with cheese, toppings, and a bright tomato cap — pizza reimagined as a family dinner. Almost simultaneously, Vito & Nick’s on the Southwest Side answered with tavern style: a cracker-thin round, party-cut into squares to keep patrons ordering “just one more” beer. Chicago forged pizza’s thick-and-thin extremes, then kept pushing from there.
And the city never stopped. Stuffed pizza showed up in 1971 with competing origin stories. Pequod’s caramelized pan crust started a cult. Roman “pizza Michelangelo” Gabriele Bonci chose Chicago for his only U.S. bakeries. Thousands of pizzerias keep the ovens roaring across Chicagoland — every major style on earth has a following here.
The crew lives here, argues here, and keeps adding pins. This page is the front door to every Chicagoland spot on the map — the city proper plus the suburbs that hold their own (Cicero, Homewood, Tinley Park, and the rest of the family).
