Best Pizza in Chicago, Ranked

Chicago will argue for hours about whether deep dish even counts as pizza — a casserole with a marketing department, the bit goes — but it won't argue about where the argument started. In 1943, Ike Sewell, a former University of Texas football player, and Ric Riccardo, a WWII veteran, opened a restaurant on the Near North Side that went through a few names before settling on Pizzeria Uno in 1955, the same year its sister restaurant Pizzeria Due opened down the block. Sewell had actually wanted to open a Mexican restaurant; accounts differ on exactly what changed his mind, but Riccardo and a pizza thick enough to eat with a fork won out.

Here's the part Uno's own history doesn't dwell on: nobody has ever fully settled who actually invented the recipe. Uno credits Sewell. Food historians increasingly credit Riccardo with the original idea and Sewell with the showmanship that made it famous. A 1956 newspaper article credited chef Rudy Malnati Sr. — but later research suggests Malnati didn't actually join the kitchen until a few years after the restaurant opened, which complicates that version too. A cook named Alice May Redmond has also been named as a contributor. Treat any single, tidy "deep dish was invented by ___" claim with real skepticism; this one has never had a clean answer.

What isn't in dispute is what happened next. Rudy Malnati Sr.'s son Lou grew up around that kitchen and, in 1971, opened his own place in Lincolnwood. Lou Malnati's is now the name most Chicagoans reach for by default, with locations across the city and suburbs — two of them, River North and Buffalo Grove, on this very list.

Deep dish also isn't the pizza most Chicagoans actually eat on a Tuesday. That's tavern-style: a thin, cracker-crisp crust cut into small squares instead of wedges — the "party cut" — built to sit on a bar top next to a pitcher of beer, not to be the whole meal. It's the format that actually fills Chicago's corner taverns and family pizzerias in higher volume than deep dish ever does; it just doesn't photograph as well for an out-of-towner's Instagram.

The list below holds both traditions, plus the city's habit of putting its own stamp on borrowed ideas — Pequod's caramelized, almost-burnt crust edge; Milly's real crisped-butter pan edges; Novel Pizza Cafe layering longganisa and giardiniera onto a crust in Pilsen. Same instinct that turned a gyro cart into a Greektown institution or a wedding-day meat-stretching trick into Italian beef: take something, make it stubbornly, specifically Chicago's.