#1
9.2Top Tier
Style guide
Best Deep Dish Pizza
A ranked guide to Deep Dish entries across The Slice Index.
Chicago’s deep-dish tradition is really a family of related pan pizzas. It includes classic deep dish (Uno’s), stuffed pizza (Giordano’s), and the caramelized-edge pan style that bears some resemblance to Detroit style (Burt’s Place and Pequod’s). Classic deep dish is built in a high-sided pan with a rich, crisp crust, cheese and toppings underneath, and tomato sauce on top. Stuffed pizza takes the idea even further by adding a second layer of dough beneath the sauce. All three treat pizza less as a thin platform for toppings and more as a substantial construction built around the pan. At its best, the crust should be flavorful and almost biscuit-like, often enriched with butter or lard. Done correctly, this is not simply ordinary pizza made thicker, nor is it a cheese casserole: the crust should remain crisp and sturdy rather than soggy or leaden, with enough acidity from the tomatoes to balance the considerable quantities of cheese, dough, and toppings, especially Chicago’s fennel-heavy sausage.
Score keyTop Tier · 9.0+Great · 8.0–8.9Worth the Calories · 6.5–7.9All Pizza’s Good, Right? · Below 6.5
#2
9.0Top Tier
Pequod’s Pizza, named after the ill-fated ship in Moby-Dick, was founded in 1971 by legendary Chicago pizzaiolo Burt Katz. Katz later opened another pizzeria named after the first mate in Moby-Dick—Starbuck’s—b…
#3
8.4Great
#4
8.3Great
#5
8.1Great
#6
7.9Worth the Calories
#7
7.7Worth the Calories
A Chicago pan pizza pizzeria, in the style of @pequodspizza or @burtsplacepizza (two of my all-time favorites), but located in Mercato, Naples. There’s a lot of mediocre non-Chicagoland Chicago style places wit…
#8
7.6Worth the Calories
Lou Malnati’s (Chicago, USA) - A Chicago staple since 1971, @loumalnatis delivers a prototypical example deep dish pizza... I might even call it archetypical. But Joe, you might ask: what exactly is “deep dish”…
#9
7.6Worth the Calories
Chicago Style Deep-Dish pizza in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood. ~300 miles from Chicago, Cincinnati (like many Midwestern cities) features an assortment of mediocre deep dish pizzerias (often featuring wa…
#10
7.4Worth the Calories
#11
7.4Worth the Calories
#12
6.5Worth the Calories
Like most people, when I hear “bourbon house” I think of Chicago Deep Dish pizza. Somewhat unexpectedly, there’s a cluster of good deep dish places in Northern Ky - After all who doesn’t enjoy a giant cheese ca…
#13
6.2All Pizza’s Good, Right?
This German-named Green Township pizzeria (on Werk Road) split off from the Mio's chain in 2007. Werkhaus's specialty is a Chicago-style stuffed pizza. Stuffed pizza is the peak of Chicago style excess, being e…
#14
6.1All Pizza’s Good, Right?
#15
5.3All Pizza’s Good, Right?
#16
5.3All Pizza’s Good, Right?
#17
5.2All Pizza’s Good, Right?
The Masons, who it is said used secret knowledge to construct wonders like the Great Pyramid & Solomon’s Temple, turned their attention to constructing the perfect pizza (pie-ramid?) in 2015 opening Two Cities…
#18
4.5All Pizza’s Good, Right?
Closed PizzeriasHistorical records are kept below open entries
#19
6.4All Pizza’s Good, Right?
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, forme…