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BY RICK HYNUM

Carl Sandburg famously summed up the Windy City in a poem titled “Chicago.” He wrote about the tool makers, the hog butchers, the freight handlers, even the mobsters and the “painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.” But he never said a word about the pizza makers. Then again, Sandburg wrote the poem in 1914, and pizza wasn’t a thing there yet. Today, it’s one of the city’s defining traits—and we’re talking not one, not two, but three distinctive styles of pizza that originated there. No other U.S city can lay claim to that kind of diversity. And there are some two-fisted Chicagoans who might slug you if you told them otherwise.

But Chicago’s pizza scene is still widely misunderstood. Yes, there’s the deepdish style, and that’s an experience unto itself. Not everyone loves it—comedian Jon Stewart once jokingly called it “an above-ground marinara swimming pool for rats”—and locals, frankly, don’t eat a lot of it. Yet when many non-Chicagoans think pizza, they think deep-dish and only deep-dish.

Jonathan Porter, owner of Chicago Pizza Tours, gets a lot of that. Founded in 2009, his company has 10-plus employees and operates several buses that take tourists to iconic pizzerias and off-the-beaten-path joints all over the city. “For out-of-towners, there’s that shocked look on their face when I say, ‘Now, Chicago is known as the deep-dish capital of the world, but, for the most part, the locals only eat it on special occasions or when people from out of town are visiting us. What we grew up on is a thin-crust tavern-style pizza, a circular pizza cut into squares,’” Porter says. “Luckily, we usually have some locals on every tour who start nodding in agreement to help back me up.”

Porter’s clients still go back to their hotels happy. “Those out-of-towners are usually relieved by the end of the tour that it wasn’t all deep-dish, since we typically sample around eight slices,” he says. “It also gives them a real sense of what the pizza culture is truly like in Chicago. It would be crazy if, every time we wanted to eat pizza, it was a deep-dish.”

Think Deeper

After all, the deep-dish variety, made famous by chains like Pizzeria Uno, Lou Malnati’s and Gino’s East, is hardly light, lunchtime fare. Baked in round steel pans, a deep-dish pie can range from between 1” and 3” thick, with the ingredients layered on in reverse order: The cheese goes first, then the meats, next the veggies, and finally a generous quantity of crushed tomatoes. The crust itself might be thin to medium, but it feels thicker because it’s loaded with ingredients. Put plainly, it’s a bellybuster.

The origin of deep-dish pizza is shrouded in controversy, although not for lack of self-proclaimed inventors. It debuted at Pizzeria Uno in 1943 under founder Ike Sewell, who also started Pizzeria Due in 1955. “The lore behind who invented it makes for a great story, and it adds to the mystique of the style,” Porter says. “But, in the end, it doesn’t really matter who, how, when or why it happened. All we know for 100%