![]() The cheese and sausage (“I have a patent on it,” George said) are from the same family-owned Chicago purveyors, and the crust is still made according to Mary Barraco’s recipe. “When they order an Old Style, you really know they’re a South Sider,” she said. To this day, old-timers from the neighborhood call it Nick and Vito’s, a habit that started after Vito died in 1976, said Nick’s daughter, Rose Barraco George, who now runs the place. They moved to Pulaski Road in 1965, renaming it Vito and Nick’s. That’s when they added pizza - Mary’s thin-crust pizza. In 1945, their son Nick, back from the war, joined the business. His wife, Mary, cooked simple food, spaghetti and such. Vito Barraco had been running taverns since 1920, first near the old Cook County Hospital, then 80th and Halsted, then 79th and Carpenter. Credit: Vito and Nick’s/Facebook It’s cash only at Vito and Nick’s - or Nick and Vito’s, depending on who’s talking. ![]() Tourists line up daily at the original River North spot. Today, there are Uno’s in 21 states and five other countries, including Kuwait and Honduras. He and Sewell first called the place The Pizzeria, then Pizzeria Riccardo and finally Pizzeria Uno - to distinguish it from the second location Sewell opened up the street, Pizzeria Due, which opened in the mid 1950s. The feds shut down the bar, Riccardo took it over and, wanting to have some sort of signature item, came up with deep-dish. The story - the one repeated for decades, the one told by the corporation now called Uno Pizzeria & Grill- credits Ike Sewell for introducing this never-before-seen culinary creation to the world.īut the lesser-known version, as vetted by Samuelson in years of research, puts Ric Riccardo, Sewell’s business partner, as originator. Riccardo, owner of Riccardo’s on Rush Street, lived in an apartment above a noisy bar at Wabash and Ohio. The birthplace of deep-dish pizza, simply known as Uno’s, opened in 1943. Credit: Pizzeria Uno/Facebook Deep-dish can be traced back to 1943. If there is a way to screw up cheese, sauce and dough - and there is, aficionados would insist - these venerable spots haven’t figured it out. Some opened as pizzerias, others as taverns, and while their menus might now offer chicken wings, quinoa burgers and gluten-free brownies, their stock in trade remains pizza. These are the places that started and have stayed in Chicago (though some have multiplied beyond city limits). None went out of their way to claim the title - history can get murky when it comes to food - so after digging through news archives and interviewing current and past owners, we’ve done it for them. Meanwhile, the city’s 10 oldest pizzerias just keep doing what they’ve done for generations. There is no end to the discourse on what makes an authentic/atrocious pie. Nowadays, Chicago pizza aficionados (which, you could say, includes all of us) have their pick of restaurants serving every style of pie: Neapolitan, New Haven, Quad Cities. But pizza and the pizzeria were here to stay. Today there are more than a hundred, and the neon signs shout ‘Pizza’ all over town.”īy 1961, Granato’s was no more, felled by construction of the new University of Illinois at Chicago campus. “It becomes the cool food, the cool meal to go with your rock ’n’ roll,” Samuelson said.Ī 1953 Chicago Daily Tribune story documented the trend: “Sixteen short years ago there wasn’t a pizzeria in the Chicago classified telephone directory. Taverns put out thin, square-cut pizza as bar snacks patrons indulged.īut pizza really took off in the 1950s, according to Tim Samuelson, the city’s cultural historian. RELATED: A Guide to Chicago Pizza: From Deep-Dish to Tavern-Style and Beyondĭeep-dish came along in 1943, and as soldiers returned home from World War II, the pizza business picked up. Considered the city’s first official pizzeria by food-writing folks of the time, Granato’s advertised its round pizzas baked in a wood-burning oven, setting it apart from Italian bakeries in the neighborhood selling sheet-pan pizza alongside breads and pastries. In the 1930s, Granato’s on Taylor Street was that place. This story was originally published by DNAinfo Chicago in 2016.ĬHICAGO - Hard to believe, but there was a time when pizza in Chicago was a novelty, not a given, when restaurants specializing in it got more buzz than a Brendan Sodikoff spot and squirrels could feast on a slice without becoming social media sensations.
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