Thin is in

it's the new black (again)

Hi, everyone!

Let’s welcome back Brian Erst, who wrote a great piece about Uncle Jerry’s Pizza Company in January. He’s an old buddy of mine who knows a ton about Chicago’s pizza scene, and this is the second installment of his pizza wars series, detailing all of Chicago’s pizza styles (there’s more than you think, my friends).

Today’s edition is about thin crust pizza, aka tavern-style or party-cut, which is the namesake of this newsletter. It always deserves some love, and funny enough, I’ve only written about the style once here so far. I’m slackin’, huh?

If you upgrade your subscription today, half of the money will go to Brian. So if you’ve been thinking about it, now’s the time. Show him some love, because today’s edition is incredible:

Now it’s time to help ourselves to a square slice, and head to Westmont, Illinois.

---

Pizza Wars Part II: Thin is In

All photo credits: Brian Erst

In January, we started our comparison of the five indigenous Chicago styles of pizza: deep dish, deep pan with caramelized cheese, stuffed, thin crust and double decker.

We began this series with what the world outside of Chicago (but not listeners to Steve Dolinsky’s Pizza City podcast) think of when they hear the term “Chicago style” pizza—deep dish. It’s an iconic style, big, bold and crowd pleasing. That article highlighted Uncle Jerry’s Pizza Company and their fresh take on the classic. But folks in Chicago, and especially those on the South Side of the city, take exception to the idea that deep dish is “the” Chicago style pizza.

For millions of Chicagoans, the meal known mostly just as “pizza,” is thin crust cut into squares, and a style often delivered in a box with tabs (and that funny little plastic thing shaped like a table).

That box is also known to flummox out-of-towners like a certain YouTube pizza reviewer who takes far more than a single bite.

Those who love this style of pizza are often exasperated by the widely shared belief that deep dish is the pizza of choice in Chicago. There are millions of people, in and around Chicago, who have been eating pizza their whole lives and have never had a deep dish pizza or have had it once or twice just to see what the fuss was about. We call these people South Siders.

Like many Chicago rivalries, this has a geographical component. Stereotypical North Siders love their Cubbies, know where to get the best cinnamon rolls, celebrate the art of brunch, and eat deep dish pizza. South Siders root for the Sox, know to order the mild sauce with their wings, grab a Big Baby, Gym Shoe or sweet steak for lunch, and eat thin crust pizza. Although there are nuggets of truth in those generalizations, the fact is that Chicagoans of all stripes eat more thin crust pizza than any other style.

So, in this installment of Pizza Wars, I’m going to make the best case for thin crust pizza being the true “Chicago style” pizza. Remember, this isn’t a series of best-in-show. It highlights my personal favorites, places I think show the passion, dedication and know-how to showcase the craft of making great pizza.

Your thin crust primer

The most common form of pizza served in Chicagoland is rolled thin, baked crispy and cut into a grid of small squares. This style of pizza has nearly as many names as practitioners—pizza, thin crust, Chicago thin, Midwest thin, square-cut, party-cut and the weirdly divisive name, tavern-style. I’m not kidding about that last one. If you want to be on the receiving end of unhinged, Twitter-style rants, use the term “tavern-style” in a Facebook pizza forum.

When made correctly, this style is supremely crisp, deeply savory and somehow both light and filling. Family fights will break out over the prized corner pieces, which are the only part of the pizza cut into a triangle and guaranteed to be crispy throughout.

The rest of the pizza is cut into squares, easy to share and easy to have “just a little more,” but this dooms a lot of pizza places to serve soggy, messy middle pieces where a very thin crust fights a losing battle against sauce, grease, cheese and time.

Unlike the rest of the country, the most popular topping for pizza in Chicago is sausage. Fennel-laced garlicky sausage is grabbed raw by the handful, pinched and pressed directly onto the sauce so that the flavor of the sausage blends with the sauce to add a porky, savory depth. While this will spike the blood pressure of those same anti-tavern style purists, the second most popular topping is pepperoni. Sausage and pepperoni pizza is really big in Chicago. After that, some version of “The Special” reigns supreme, with some subset of sausage, green pepper, onion and mushroom usually placed under the cheese. [Dennis’ note: this one’s my favorite.]

Thin crust pizza in Chicago can also be split into three major variations. The most common uses what I call “Chicago Universal Pizza Dough,” a style of dough that a pizzeria operator can use to make multiple kinds of pizza. It’s rolled thin for thin crust, pushed into a pan for deep dish or pan pizza, or it’s combined in a thick rolled bottom and a thin rolled top to create stuffed pizza. This is a Jack-of-all-trades dough with a low hydration but quite a bit of oil. It doesn't make the best version of any of the above but is very flexible.

The next most common style is cracker thin. This type of dough is very lean with little to no oil that tends to bake up into two very thin and crispy layers like an enormous but very skinny oyster cracker.

Finally, there is the most crispety-crunchety version of them all: The cold-cured crust. This dough is somewhere in-between in terms of hydration and oil content, but is rolled impossibly thin, much thinner than either of the other two styles. Then it’s left to dry out slightly in the open air and then refrigerated, layered but uncovered, for up to six days.

This is my personal favorite style of thin crust.

The crust gets crazy crispy but almost disappears when looked at sideways. It also tends to avoid the dreaded soggy middles and can support a whole pile of toppings, if layered properly.

This style is commonly associated with Pat’s Pizza in Chicago, one of several pizzerias started by the three Pianetto siblings in the early 1950’s. This pizza lineage gets a little complicated; Nick Pianetto owned Pat’s (which he started with his sister, Leona), Leona eventually owned Leona’s, and Frank owned Frank’s). 

But the pinnacle of this style is now at a place in west suburban Westmont called Kim’s Uncle Pizza.

Kim’s Uncle Pizza is the culmination of a series of bizarre twists and turns starting with a group of friends handing out free pizza, a global pandemic pivot, and reimagining a childhood pizza joint. It’s also freaking delicious.

Billy Federighi, Cecily Marie Federighi (who are now married), and Brad Shorten are friends who took a circuitous path to becoming pizzeria owners. They were all successful in other careers (Billy directed the film Adventures in the Sin Bin starring Bo Burnham, and Cecily was a cover model) who lived in apartments in the same Ukrainian Village building.

After seven years of monthly pizza get-togethers making artisan style pizzas in a hodge-podge variety of ovens (including a Weber grill insert and a hacked Whirlpool oven that got so hot that it eventually destroyed itself), they started offering free pizzas to patrons at a bar in the same building. This eventually morphed into the Instagram-centered Eat Free Pizza project where people would DM them for the opportunity to pick up free pizza (at the bar or at the apartment) on weekends. 

Just before the world turned upside-down with COVID, Eat Free Pizza became the pizza portion of Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream (now closed), a new neighborhood pizzeria and chicken sandwich joint next to Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar in Bridgeport. And as soon as they opened, the world stopped.

By this time, they had switched to amazing Sicilian style pizzas that were getting raves as one of the pandemic pizzas to get. But a combination of workflow, staffing and delivery issues made it time to switch things up again.

Thin crust pizzas are faster to make, faster to bake, and easier to takeout and deliver than Sicilian pizzas. Plus, as South Siders, it was a natural fit with the neighborhood. After years of making every sort of pizza, Billy started developing a recipe for thin crust pizza that would meet the group’s high standards, as well as streamline the workflow in a kitchen that needed to keep workers safe in a pandemic.

Billy settled on a cold cured method similar to Pat’s with a low hydration, moderate fat dough that leads to a crust so crisp it shatters under your teeth. It's a genius method of getting a crispy crust, which gets rid of all the water ahead of time. It also makes preparing and baking a pizza quick and easy; the dough skins are ready to top and bake.

A crust that good needs the best toppings, too. The group blind-tested tomatoes, figured out the right cheese for this style of pizza, and used Ezzo Cup and Char pepperoni (on top, where God and nature intended it to be). And as this was a South Side pizzeria, sausage would be king. Billy created his own recipe, handmade in batches, with a blend of fresh and dried spices. 

This was one of my favorite pandemic pizzas. The ultimate thin crust pizza served from a walk-in counter and eaten outside, in the properly socially distanced enclosed patio. Bridgeport is a haul from my place in the north suburbs; I probably ate there a few too many times (I started to feel a little stalkery).

But all good things come to an end, and so it was for Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream, which closed at the end of December of last year. After a change in direction, their space became unavailable, but fortunately for us, they had already scouted out a new location, and one in the town that Brad grew up in. 

So as not to make a long story even longer, the short version of the history of Kim’s Uncle Pizza is that the pizzeria was originally started by Peter Presto in 1947 as Uncle Pete’s Pizza (lots of uncles in pizza). He eventually took on a partner named Kim Sinclair, a Korean-American entrepreneur who bought the rest of the business in 1987 and who was friends with Maria Marszewski (owner of Maria’s Packaged Goods).

When Kim was looking to retire, Ed Marszewski, Maria’s son, brought it to the attention of Billy, Cecily, and Brad, who jumped on the chance to keep Brad’s childhood pizzeria alive. A slight rebranding happened to acknowledge Kim’s legacy in the location, and Kim’s Uncle Pizza was born.

Enough with the history lesson, man—how’s the pizza?

In a word: spectacular.

Kim’s doesn’t just continue the PFCIC legacy. It improves upon it. A lot of that comes from the fact that the restaurant came with a Fauld’s oven.

If you go to a lot of old-school thin crust pizzerias in Chicago, you will find that the best of them often have a Fauld’s oven in the back. They are simple rotating stone deck ovens (think Ferris Wheel O’ Pizza) but the way they hold heat leads to incredibly crispy crusts. Using the Fauld’s oven, there are absolutely no soggy middles. You won’t be fighting over the edge pieces and making your kids eat the center pieces here.

My go-to order at Kim’s is sausage and pepperoni.

Billy’s sausage recipe is unique in Chicago. His blend of dried and fresh herbs includes fennel, black pepper, garlic and sage. The sausage is partially prepared to Billy’s specifications by an artisan sausage supplier, but is finished at Kim’s with freshly chopped herbs blended into each batch by hand. It’s an amazingly complex and savory sausage, like a shotgun wedding of Italian sausage and breakfast sausage. 

The sauce on the pizza is also incredibly well seasoned. This is not the standard can of Stanislaus Full-Red Pizza sauce placed straight from the can onto your pizza. It has notes of oregano, red and black pepper and garlic, and is simmered for 45 minutes. This is a sauce with an opinion it is unafraid to share. It stands up to the other toppings and enhances them.

And finally, can we talk a little bit about the unholy amount of pepperoni in the picture above?

Unlike many other Chicago pizzerias, Kim’s puts the pepperoni on top, where it cups and lightly chars to create little chalices of hot pepperoni oil ready for each bite. Crunchy, meaty, greasy-in-the-best-way, this pepperoni takes an excellent pizza and sends it over the top.

All three friends still work together making those pizzas. On a typical day Billy is making dough and sauce while Cecily sheets and cures the dough and Brad preps and runs service. At night, Brad prepares the pies for the oven, Billy launches and bakes them, and Cecily handles all the orders and customers (positions can change as the night progresses). Every time I show up, Billy is in back washing dishes, so his title might need to be “Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.”

The best thing about Kim’s is not the pizza

The best thing is the people.

Billy, Cecily, and Brad are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, friendly and open and laughing all night long. They have even taken a liking to weirdo pizza fans like me who talk their ears off for hours about pizza and life. Like the Czerwinski’s at Uncle Jerry’s, they are passionate about their pizza, their community and the greater Brother and Sisterhood of Pizza. Cecily will be a featured panelist at this year’s Pizza City Fest Chicago on the Women in Pizza panel. I know I will be there, right in the front row.

Kim’s Uncle Pizza is a little off the beaten path (OK, way off the path) but it’s important to know that there is great pizza all over Chicagoland, not just the city. People are flocking there anyway. Order times can get crazy on weekends (that gorgeous but small Fauld’s oven can only make so many pizzas at a time), so I’d suggest checking them out midweek if you can swing it. Sit in one of their cozy booths (there are only two of them, so be prepared to take out).

And as you taste some of the best pizza in the area, you will see why for many Chicagoans, thin crust is their True Chicago Style pizza. And mine.

Kim’s Uncle Pizza
207 N Cass Ave
Westmont, IL 60559

Hours:
Monday, Tuesday, closed
All other days open from 4 p.m.-9 p.m.

---

Hello, it’s Dennis again! I have to say, Kim’s Uncle is probably my favorite right now too. When Kenji Lopez-Alt came to visit a while back, it was one of the places we went together. I can vouch for how wonderful Billy, Cecily, and Brad are as well. Yes, it’s a haul, but get your asses out there.

This is an incredible piece, so let’s show Brian some love by sharing it on social media or by forwarding it to all the pizza fans you know, which should essentially be everybody:

And don’t forget to upgrade your subscription.

It supports The Party Cut, pays Brian (good writing should never be free) and keeps this thing afloat. It’s essentially a passion project; considering I’ve got a full-time job, along with a primary newsletter, you can imagine your support is greatly appreciated.

We’re about at the max length you can get for a Substack newsletter, so I’ll say farewell now. Next week’s post is for paid subscribers (just like every alternating week), so see you then. Love you guys, and have a terrific week.