Chi-nnati's

Because every Mexican restaurant inexplicably has an hour-long wait, my friends and I end up celebrating Cinco de Mayo at a former Mexican restaurant: Chi-nnati’s in Kenwood.

Chi-nnati’s occupies the old Jalapeño’s building, formerly one of Cincinnati’s better Mexican restaurants. It is now a Chicago-style pizzeria with a comfortable sports-bar layout, plenty of well-positioned televisions, and a good beer selection.

I visit once about six months earlier and come away thinking it is a pleasant place to watch football, with good appetizers and pretty decent pizza. However, I make the mistake of ordering the thin crust. As a general rule, you should order a restaurant’s specialty, and Chi-nnati’s clearly emphasizes its deep dish. With a large group this time, we are able to try several.

A warning: the deep-dish pizzas take about 40 minutes to prepare. This seems reasonable once they arrive. These are substantial constructions.

We order a Queen City Margherita and a large Four Cheese with mozzarella, ricotta, Romano, and mild blue cheese. A thin-crust Cincinnati chili pizza also makes an appearance, though the deep dish is clearly the main event.

The Four Cheese arrives looking like a cake made from sauce and cheese. The "mild" blue cheese is the dominant flavor, but it works surprisingly well with the other cheeses. The sauce contains chunks of tomato and has a slightly sweet, garlicky flavor. This is important because there is an enormous amount of both sauce and cheese.

The crust is crisp enough to hold everything together, but its flavor is a little dull. It lacks the buttery, biscuit-like quality of the crust at many Chicago deep-dish pizzerias. Instead, it serves primarily as structural support and is largely overwhelmed by the toppings. On a less excessive pizza, that might be a serious problem. Here, the sauce and cheese are good enough to carry it.

The pizza is intensely flavorful and the best example of Chicago-style deep dish I have tried in Cincinnati. That may be faint praise - it's no Lou Malnati's - but it blows the Uno’s franchises out of the water.