Chow Down Chicago: Good Eats from the Windy City

Most people think of Chicago-style pizza as deep-dish, but that’s not the only game in town. While deep-dish pizza is popular with tourists, thin-crust pizza is what Chicagoans are more likely to eat regularly. According to WBEZ, thin-crust pizza orders outnumber deep-dish and stuffed pizza orders 10 to 1 in this city. And tavern-style is Chicago’s signature thin-crust pizza. My sister Jane calls tavern-style “the pizza of my childhood memories.” For many of us Chicagoans, this is the pizza we grew up on. So what makes a Chicago tavern-style pizza? The crust is cracker-thin, the toppings go under the cheese, the sauce and cheese go all the way to edge of the crust, and, perhaps most importantly, the pizza is cut into squares. It's called "tavern-style" because of the many taverns across the city that served this style of pizza starting in the late 1940s. The cracker-thin crust makes the pizza easy to eat as a bar snack. The toppings go under the cheese to prevent them fr