Well we've got Uno's here, and that's Chicago deep dish. And Rosatti's, which also serves an edible thin crust. But you're right, it's damned near impossible to get a good pizza in the state. They peddle something called 'St. Louis style pizza' which has a cracker-thin crust that I find almost inedible. I've been here 15 years and I still miss the little hole-in-the-wall pizza shops that dotted Chicago and the suburbs.
For some reason, ALL of the pizza chains start in places where pizza is not indigenous. (Papa Johns, Shakey's, Godfathers, Boston Pizza, Domino)
Well, when you don't have good pizza to begin with then anything will do.
In my youth, I was a Pizza Hut cook. On slow nights and days, I would sometimes pull out this special training gizmo that used cartridges with audio and still color photos.
One of these training cartridges was called “The Pizza Hut Story.” Like all of these stories it began with a young man or men (in this case, brothers) who borrowed a modest sum from family to go into business ($600 dollars).
The story continued, “but there was only one problem, they didn’t know how to make pizza.” So I thought this was when they would have that dramatic meeting with an aged Italiano who taught them the secrets, or perhaps months of experimenting would help them find a secret combination of ingredients, maybe they even hired a third partner who had a great recipe. Thge story should have had a dramatic turn at that point, explaining why Pizza Hut went big when others stayed small...
The story continued ...
“So they learned how to make pizza.”
That’s it?! They learned how to make pizza?!
This was the beginning of the commotization of pizza, finished when Tom Monaghan stated that he wwasn’t in the pizza business, but in the pizza delivery business.