The Best Pizza in Chicago: Deep Dish vs Tavern-Style

Ask ten Chicagoans where to find the best pizza in Chicago and you will get two arguments before you get one address. This city runs on a two-party pizza system: deep dish, the famous one, beloved by visitors and birthdays; and tavern-style thin crust, the square-cut secret that locals actually order on a Friday night. We are fluent in both, we vote thin, and we are here to explain the whole ballot.

The Two-School Thesis

Here is the misunderstanding we spend the most time correcting. The world believes Chicago pizza means deep dish, full stop. Chicago believes deep dish is for occasions: out-of-town guests, celebrations, that one uncle. What the city eats week in and week out is tavern-style: a thin, crackery, round pizza cut into small squares rather than wedges, built to be eaten one-handed with a beer in the other.

Both schools are legitimately great, and the trick is knowing which tool fits which job. Deep dish is a sit-down event, a knife-and-fork casserole of a meal that takes real time to bake and real commitment to finish. Tavern-style is social infrastructure, the pizza of family tables, corner bars, and softball leagues, engineered for grazing across an evening.

Our advice to visitors has never changed: eat both, in that order of fame but the reverse order of frequency. Do the deep dish pilgrimage once, properly. Then eat tavern-style twice and understand why we live here.

Deep Dish: the Famous Casserole

The origin story starts in 1943 at Pizzeria Uno in River North, where the house legend credits founders Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo with inventing a pizza built like a pie: tall buttery crust pressed up the sides of a deep pan, cheese laid down first, toppings next, and chunky tomato sauce ladled over the top, the inverted order protecting the cheese through a long bake. Uno's still serves the ancestral version in its old brownstone corner, and eating one where it all began remains a legitimate bucket-list move.

Lou Malnati's is the family dynasty of the form, founded by a veteran of the early deep dish world, now the name most locals give when forced to endorse a deep dish at all. The signature is the butter crust, rich and almost pastry-like, plus an optional sausage layer that blankets the whole pie. It is the most consistent deep dish in the city, and consistency matters when a pizza takes the better part of an hour.

Giordano's completes the tourist trinity with the stuffed pizza, a related but distinct form that adds a second thin layer of dough over the cheese before the sauce goes on, producing something even taller and more ceremonial than classic deep dish. Stuffed versus deep dish is its own minor debate, and we will spare you the full seminar; the practical takeaway is that stuffed runs richer and denser still, so calibrate your ordering accordingly.

Then there is Pequod's, the connoisseur's pick, technically a pan pizza rather than a classic deep dish, famous for its ring of caramelized cheese, the blackened, crisp-chewy edge where cheese meets hot iron. That burnt halo has its own fan club, ourselves included. One warning applies across the school: order thoughtfully, because a single slice is a meal and the second one is a decision.

Tavern-Style: What Locals Actually Order

Now the home team. Tavern-style is thin, but not Neapolitan-thin or New York-floppy; it is cracker-crisp, rolled flat, sauced with a tangy cooked tomato sauce, covered edge to edge with toppings and a modest amount of cheese, baked until rigid, and cut into squares. The style grew up in the city's working-class taverns, where bars gave away or cheaply sold salty pizza to keep patrons on their stools, and where a square cut let a whole bar share one pie without forks, plates, or interruption of conversation.

The square cut, also called the party cut, is the point. Corner pieces are all crunch, center pieces are pure crustless indulgence, and edge pieces split the difference, which means one pizza contains three different eating experiences and one running argument about which is best. Wedge-cut partisans from other cities find this baffling. They are welcome to their opinions and their folded slices.

Sausage is the canonical topping, from the same local sausage tradition that feeds the city's other icons, laid on in a generous crumble. A tavern-style sausage pizza and a cold domestic beer is, we would argue, the single most Chicago meal that exists, and it costs a fraction of the famous stuff.

Deep dish is the pizza Chicago shows to company. Tavern-style is the pizza Chicago eats with the game on, and the difference between those two facts explains half the city.

The South Side Masters

The style's holy sites cluster on the South Side and the city's old-neighborhood edges. Vito & Nick's in Ashburn is the acknowledged cathedral, a family operation going back generations, where the crust achieves a crispness that borders on the theoretical and the room has not chased a trend in living memory. Pilgrims cross the city for it. They are correct to.

Marie's Pizza & Liquors, up on the Northwest Side, delivers the full period experience: a combination pizzeria and liquor store with a dining room straight out of a mid-century family album, where the party-cut pies arrive under dim chandeliers and the package-goods counter will sell you a bottle for later. It is one of the most lovable rooms in Chicago, full stop.

Pat's Pizza, a longtime North Side fixture, rounds out the traditional canon with a whisper-thin crust that thin-crust obsessives speak about in reverent tones. None of these rooms are fancy. All of them are permanent. Check their sites for current hours, bring the family, and order more than you think you need, because square pieces evaporate.

The Artisan Wave

The two-party system tells most of the story, but the last two decades added a third caucus: the artisan wave. Spacca Napoli in Ravenswood bakes certified-serious Neapolitan pies in a wood-fired oven with imported obsessiveness, and it stands with the best Neapolitan rooms in the country. Coalfire brought coal-fired, blistered, chewy-crisp pies to the West Side and became a standard-bearer for the style. And Middle Brow's Bungalow in Logan Square, a brewery-bakery-pizzeria hybrid, represents the naturally leavened new school, sourdough crusts and local flour and a neighborhood room that is always full for a reason.

We bring these up not to complicate the thesis but to complete it. The artisan rooms are excellent, and on pure crust technique some of them out-cook the institutions. But notice what happened: none of them displaced the two native schools, and the best of them quietly added square-cut thin pies to their repertoires. In Chicago, even the avant-garde ends up respecting the party cut.

How to Choose, How to Order

A decision guide, earned through years of hosting visitors. Choose deep dish when the meal is the event: first visit, celebration, a long lazy dinner with time to spare. Order one pie for every two to three people, expect a wait for the bake, and start with a salad because the pie is a finisher. Butter crust for comfort, caramelized edge for character, the original room for history.

Choose tavern-style when pizza is the fuel and company is the event: game nights, family tables, any Friday. Order sausage first, giardiniera if the room offers it, and always one more pie than the headcount suggests. Eat the corners early; they are the first to go among people who know.

• Deep dish: sit-down event, fork and knife, one slice is a meal.
• Tavern-style: hand food, square cut, built for sharing and beer.
• Artisan: date-night crusts, best enjoyed on their own terms.
• All three: check current hours before you drive across town.

A word on toppings etiquette across the schools. Deep dish rewards restraint: sausage or spinach, rarely both, because the pie is already carrying a full structural load. Tavern-style tolerates enthusiasm but honors tradition, and the local flourish worth adopting is giardiniera on a sausage pie, the hot oil-cured relish cutting the richness the way it does on an Italian beef. And on any thin crust, a shake of dried oregano from the jar on the table is not decoration; it is participation.

Timing matters as much as style. A deep dish bake does not respect curtain times, a lesson theatergoers learn exactly once; if you are eating before a show downtown, the smarter playbook lives in our guide to Theater District restaurants, where kitchens actually understand a 7:30 curtain.

The Party-Cut Debate, Adjudicated

We should address the controversy directly, since it flares up every time a national food writer discovers our squares. The case against the party cut: uneven pieces, crustless center squares, structural chaos. The case for it, which is the correct case: the square cut turns a pizza from a portion into a commons. Nobody claims a slice; everybody grazes. The pie stays on the table, the conversation stays open, and the corner pieces create a small economy of desire that wedge cutting cannot match.

There is also a practical truth: a cracker-thin crust cut into wedges droops from the tip. Squares hold. Form follows crust. The debate, as far as we are concerned, was settled in the taverns decades ago, and the squares won on merit.

We will even concede the opposition one point: at the artisan rooms, where the crust is puffy and blistered rather than crisp, wedges make sense, and the party cut would be vandalism. The rule is not squares everywhere. The rule is that the cut serves the crust, and on a proper tavern-style pie, the crust votes square.

What unites every school, squares and wedges and casseroles alike, is that this is a city where pizza is taken as seriously as any tasting menu. The same town that argues about corner pieces also debates dry-aging like a graduate seminar, as our tour of the best steakhouses makes clear. Seriousness about dinner is the local religion. Pizza is just its most affordable sacrament.

The Late Slice

One last scenario, because it is summer and the nights run long. It is after midnight, the show is over, the patio closed an hour ago, and you want pizza. This is tavern-style's home turf: the corner spots and bar kitchens that serve squares deep into the night were built for exactly this customer, and a hot party-cut pie at 1 a.m. is one of the city's reliable mercies. We keep a full map of those mercies in our guide to late night food, and pizza anchors it for a reason.

And since it is the last day of June, a seasonal footnote: summer is thin crust's finest hour. Deep dish is winter food at heart, a casserole against the cold, but a tavern-style pie travels to the beach, survives the back porch, and shares a cooler with anything. The square cut was practically designed for a picnic table. Plan your July accordingly.

So here is the whole doctrine, one last time. Deep dish once, done right, at a founding room. Tavern-style often, sausage on top, corners first. Artisan when the evening calls for it. And never, ever ask for it cut in wedges. You are in Chicago now. Eat the squares.