You’ve heard of Chicago deep-dish pizza: loved by some, mocked by others. (Jon Stewart famously referred to it as “tomato soup in a bread bowl.”) What you might not know is that there’s something deeper than deep-dish—a bigger, doughier version known as stuffed pizza.
These pizzas thud onto tables around the city; Giordano’s has 50 or so restaurants in the metro area, plus several beyond Illinois. But my favorite location is downtown, on Rush Street—the one where all the tourists go. I love to look around the clamorous room and watch everything, from families with fidgety toddlers to spiky-haired Japanese couples to Urdu-speaking university students. You can almost see panic in their eyes when the pizza arrives, and a waterfall of mozzarella spills down from each wedge as the server spatulas it up from the platter and hefts it onto the plate. Then they have to decide whether to eat the enormous, gooey slice with a fork or by hand. It’s a lot to observe, but since it takes 45 minutes to cook a Giordano’s stuffed pie, I’ve got the time while I wait.
