16 cult pizzas in Chicago you don’t know — unless you’re part of the cult

Cult pizza — which is what I call Chicago pizza that has a substantial following yet doesn’t always work its way to best-of lists, inspire lines of tourists or rattle reflexively off tongues that brag about Chicago being the greatest pizza town in America — is our everyday pizza.

It’s your neighborhood pizza, it’s the pizza you grab on the way home, the pizza you crawl into when 6 inches of snow cover the ground and the pizza you return to decades after you have moved away somewhere. Its makers occupy Chicago storefronts that are closer to urban wallpaper, everywhere and nowhere, seen and not seen, necessary to live here yet taken for granted, paradoxically rooted in your personal history though somehow underrated.

Cult pizza is family.

Odd as it is to suggest a parallel world of local pizza consumption — operating in plain sight, away from the fashionable, the trends, the food writers, the calcified mirage of a deep-dish Chicago pizza mecca — that’s exactly how I’ve come to see cult pizza, as a multiverse.

And like any multiverse, a handful of planets seem to soak up all the oxygen, meanwhile the sky is full of stars, each an alternate reality burning brighter the closer you stand. The pizza in this multiverse transcends critical thought. Typical physics don’t apply. Pizza here is sometimes great, sometimes trash, but always comfortable. Outside the cult, it may leave no impression, it may taste like an imitation. Either way, it’s rarely a benchmark pizza, and never a famous pizza. Its ovens were not shipped from Italy, its dough likely didn’t ferment for days.

But the heart wants what it wants.

The cult abides.

I mention this because we are in Pizza Season.

January, February, March. We stay closer to home and prefer the familiar.

The pizza is ripest about now. And so, not long ago, in anticipation of this most magical time of the year, I took a self-guided, not-at-all-thorough tour of the Chicago pizza multiverse, on an earnest mission of understanding, on the hunt for what might be regarded as the most unappreciated pizzas (outside their already sizable followings) in the Chicago area.

Beginning with Bill’s Pizza & Pub in Mundelein, in many ways the ultimate cult pizza parlor: You might not exactly see the attraction, but then, who really cares what you see?

Bill’s resembles a hunting lodge. Its seats are dark pews, its walls are covered in taxidermic foxes, deer and raccoons; those mounted fish alongside your head come direct from founder Bill Kwiatkowski and the three generations of family that have run Bill’s since it opened in 1957. Bill was just a teenager at the time; now he’s 80. The Double Decker pizza (which Bill’s claims to have invented) is the star of the menu. The cut is tavern-style, the sauce is somewhat like gravy, the crust is firm, the onions curl through amorphous globs of cheese — it all feels as if it’s always been like this. Same goes for the peanut shells crunching beneath your feet (you’re encouraged to toss them on the floor) and Bill’s brown facade — “the ugliest dark brown you’ll ever see,” said Bill’s grandson Erik Rouse with some pride.

Place matters in the pizza multiverse, arguably as much as pizza.

Pizza here is a respite. Grab a seat in the window at Pizza Castle in Gage Park — there are only five, total — and admire the homemade collages of photographs of its regulars, pasted together as class photos of sorts, stretching back decades. The red sauce is great, the grease is ample; the pizza, tavern-style again, is begging to be cut into triangles then folded and shoveled in your mouth. But more importantly: Since 1973, Pizza Castle has been a cramped sliver of a strip-mall anchor. Because there’s nowhere to stand, customers hover at the take-out counter, chatting up owner Rich Jensen and son Rick, who succinctly and proudly described their modest place in the multiverse: “Everyone has their pizza that they will never give up on, you know? And we happen to be this neighborhood’s pizza.”

Permanence is its own attraction.

Indeed, there are so many aging, quietly imbedded pizza parlors like this within a brief drive from Midway, I came to regard 63rd Street as the Midway Pizza Corridor. Think scalloped paper plates and wood-paneled walls, waitresses standing on their feet for a dozen hours, serving customers hunched into vinyl booths beneath framed clippings published during presidential administrations long gone. The pizza places here look as if they have always been here, as if they came up from the soil ages ago, and now refuse to budge. None more so than Palermo’s of 63rd Street in Chicago, which started in 1961, founded by Antonio and Carmella Calderone, Sicilian immigrants whose son Frank still operates and cooks at the restaurant.

I went on a Sunday. The dining room resembled a once-bustling banquet hall, the waitresses wore Bears shirts, and the cushion in my booth was so unsteady I could have been sitting on a waterbed. Frank Calderone, his hair white and slicked, his eyebrows dark and bushy, emerged from the back with his apron stained by tomatoes. He shook hands with a former regular, a guy who was visiting from Florida. The man told Calderone that, in Florida, he can’t get decent pizza anymore.

Calderone threw up his hands in outrage.

He went back to the kitchen and returned with ice cream sandwiches, not only for the old friend but for everyone in the dining room. He did this just because. Older now, Calderone is still recognizable from photos on the wall. When we talked later, he noted no less than three times the very day the Chicago Daily News said he had the best pizza in the city: Aug. 31, 1971.

Permanence, however, can be an illusion.

No one would confuse Our House — not a decade old, and better known as the traveling pizza kitchen from baker Rachel Post, a summer staple of Green City Market and Logan Square farmer markets — with an institution. You grabbed a pizza, sat in the grass for an impromptu picnic. The reliable pizzas and devoted following looked timeless. Except it wasn’t: Our House is now closed, Post told me. Not enough people paid for that experience, she said. They took pictures of her domed, Tatooine-like oven, but they didn’t necessarily buy anything.

In the pizza multiverse, a vulnerability is never far from a strength.

The sauce at Palermo’s has a sugary sweetness that might make many pause — and yet without that sweetness, it’s not a Palermo’s. Small distinctions are enormous gulfs in the multiverse.

Consider the very good Lefty’s Pizza Kitchen in Wilmette, only a year and a half old and already pulling a hardcore following (and likely to expand north into Highland Park soon). Lefty’s adheres closely to a North Shore tradition of pan pies with bright chunky tomato and burnt, near-caramelized ends. Which makes sense. Owner John Munao was a partner in the revived Burt’s Place in Morton Grove, the famed pan-pizza originators. Yet Lefty’s pie is a compromise, with a doughier base than deep dish, never scorching a crust like Burt.

Likewise, without its rich sauce and rolling browned meadows of cheese, it’s hard to imagine distinguishing Joe’s Italian Villa in Palos Heights from a million other tavern-style crusts in the Southwest Suburbs. But it’s great pizza, around since 1947 exactly because of those subtleties. Detail matters: The cash register is analog, the booths are terrible red-black-green vinyl. Even the chef illustration on the to-go box is theirs, a kind of fat ghost in a toque.

Not that every place in the pizza multiverse is a shade removed from another place.

Smack Dab in Rogers Park — which has the best pizza in Chicago you had no idea about — is actually a breakfast spot and bakery on Clark Street that at night, from Thursday through Sunday only, delivers a perfectly balanced, slightly greasy, zero-pretense, slightly spicy, East Coast-style thin pie. It would rather hit all the classic slice-and-a-Coke notes of an old-school pizza parlor than reinvent the wheel. Yes, Smack Dab wears progressive politics on its sleeve to such an admirable degree — they sell “Gender is over if you want it” T-shirts — that you might assume they’d strive to innovate or at least they’d be afflicted with that Chicago comfort-food disease of not leaving well-enough alone.

But no.

“Truth is I wanted pizza that was just a bit better than what I grew up with,” said owner Axel Erkenswick, “and what I grew up eating (in Edgewater) was trash, but fun to eat.”

Which is a good description of many cult pizzas.

Bob’s Pizza in Pilsen, wowing its gentrifying neighborhood since it opened in summer, strikes a similar balance. There’s nothing low-rent here; its crust, also East Coast-thin, is made with beer instead of water, allowing a chewy tang that’s malty and rich; its ingredients include the trendy (honey) and counterintuitive (pickles). But hugging a residential corner alongside Mexican markets, with its old Zaxxon machine set to free-play, football on wide-screens and cheese that stretches for days, its heart is at home. And home is specific.

Stix N’ Brix on Armour Square Park, about two years old, within cheering distance of the White Sox, offers smart, somewhat small wood-fired pizzas that, at a glance, resemble those floppy, orthodox Neapolitan pizzas found in slews of places across town. Except owner Mario Scalise doesn’t want that authentic flop. Fashionable as Stix N’ Brix appears (brick walls, fig-jam pizzas, Monday night yoga classes), the dough isn’t pushed outward to the edges for a pillowy crust but leveled across, allowing for a meatier bite.

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Scalise wonders aloud, in fact, if they might be a touch too unusual for Bridgeport, if this isn’t their proper home, if they wouldn’t fare better maybe in the West Loop: “You ask people in this neighborhood what the best pizza is and people tell you immediately that it’s Phil’s,” he said, referencing another, more-ingrained Bridgeport spot, one that’s 60 years old, with a following that, like many cult followings, can be difficult to comprehend if standing outside.

Home is like that.

You know you’re at Forno Rosso Pizzeria Napoletana in Dunning when they refuse to cut a pizza into more than four slices (or six, if you plead). Or at Rosangela’s in Evergreen Park — started 65 years ago — when the place is packed before rush hour even begins, everyone in the wooden pews knows everyone else and a little more browned bubbling is allowed than typical of other tavern-style, cracker-crust joints.

You know you’re at Barone’s of Glen Ellyn when the crust is full of air and the deep dish comes with a generous sprinkling of Parmesan cheese already sifted on the top of the sauce. Owner Dena Colie said what I had heard, more or less, from many owners of cult pizza parlors, that the customers who move away tend to harbor a palpable craving for their home.

It’s called nostalgia and for a long time it was thought about as a clinical ailment and often diagnosed in soldiers who spent years from home, missing their friends and families. It might explain why Dante’s Pizzeria in Logan Square and Avondale remains such a criminally underrated cult — perhaps those glistening, thin UFOs of cheese that stretch out 20 inches wide and occupy whole tables are more cravable to East Coast expats than native Chicagoans? It could justify why Union Squared in Evanston — light, nearly-focaccia blocks with tomato sauce ladled across the top of the ingredients, better known as Detroit-style — has had trouble expanding outside its hardcore neighborhood following, closing downtown and Wrigleyville locations not long after opening. Pizza feels tribal, said Union Squared co-owner Vince DiBattista, “so people assume they already know what they like.”

And what they like, in Northbrook, what they have liked since the Johnson administration, is this place called Barnaby’s. Think granular crusts with a generous amount of cornmeal and curled ridges that wouldn’t look out of place on an apple pie. Orders are placed at the counter and numbers are read through a deep-toned intercom. Booths are dark wood. Natural light barely penetrates the dining room, which lends a feeling of eating inside a sepia-toned Polaroid. Complimentary cheese and crackers sit on the front counter, just like at your aunt’s, in 1976. The food’s OK, but Barnaby’s is often packed. I can’t say I understand this, but then I was too busy sipping the root beer (served on tap) to drink the Kool-Aid.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com