MY PI PIZZA

From accidental multistate franchise to national shipping success story, My Pi has rolled with the punches and persevered for 50 years as a Windy City original.

BY TRACY MORIN

In Larry Aronson’s youth, the Windy City pizza scene was still in its infancy. But his family’s roots in baking spanned generations, from his grandfather’s heyday in Belarus to his father’s Chicago bakery, just downstairs from his childhood home. After he and his now-wife frequented the new Pizzeria Uno, Larry experimented to create his own version.

By 1971, the 35-year-old Larry was a member of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and still making pizza at home—so well-loved by friends that he decided to open his own place. First, he let others run My Pi, in Rogers Park on Chicago’s Far North Side, but after a couple of owners bailed, Larry decided to abandon brokering and run it himself. “We’d opened on a rainy Tuesday in 1971,” he recalls. “We didn’t have a sign for three years, but we had a line around the block. We were written up 30 times that first year by the Chicago news. That’s how we built the business.”

Larry started to allow friends from the NYSE to build their own locations, and eventually the My Pi recipe and name stretched from Miami Beach to Colorado, Minnesota to New York—growing to 22 restaurants in nine states. “Without realizing it, I created a franchise,” Larry says. “We were the first to take deep-dish pizza out of Chicago to other states and were named the best in every city we went to. A pizza restaurant doesn’t have to be a ‘joint’—we served on china. Our pizza is unique, but we wanted to be more than pizza.”

Success was a double-edged sword for My Pi—multiple costly lawsuits waged with copycats slowed its trajectory. Larry’s son, Richard, now owns the single remaining location of My Pi, which opened in 2000 in Chicago’s Bucktown. Richard was baking with his father at four years old and later received formal education in restaurant management, then trained at The Culinary Institute of America. Fittingly, My Pi again became a national brand under his watch—this time, through shipping pizzas coast to coast, with demand now stretching the small shop’s capabilities to the literal max. Richard’s planning a move to a larger location in the near future, to expand shipping and enable full-service dining.

“A lot has changed in 50 years, but people trust us—they know the food will be good, and our word is our bond,” Larry says. “You have to learn to roll with the punches. We could’ve had 200 locations by now and gone public for millions, but I never went into this for the money. I loved the restaurant business and the personal relationship with customers. That’s what the name My Pi means.”

Tracy

Morin is PMQ’s senior copy editor.