Labriola Cafe [Meeting #117]

Labriola Cafe
535 N. Michigan Avenue (Map)
Chicago, IL 60611
(312) 955-3100

CPC invaded Labriola Cafe on Saturday, March 13, 2016. 

What, you thought the Chicago Pizza Club was dead? Not yet, my friends.

We last met almost four years ago. Then most of us spent seven months focusing on the Cubs. You might've heard what happened. Then a festering piece of shit who advocates eating pizza with a knife and fork so he can avoid the crust and also advocates eating pizza crust first was actually elected President of the United States. The Chicago Pizza Club clings to the hope that this national nightmare is coming to an end this year so some normalcy can return to the world and we can return to the blogosphere. Fun fact: The CPC started before blogs were a thing and has now outlasted blogs being a thing.

Now let us turn to the last pizza club meeting, one that we all remember like it was yesterday thanks to some truly outstanding deep dish pizza. But first, some history. Chicago was very late to the bread renaissance. Today there are plenty of restaurants that make great bread and places like Publican Quality Bread wholesale top-notch stuff. But it wasn't that long ago that places like Red Hen were as good as it got in town. In that era (starting in the early 90s), Labriola Baking Company was a big player in Chicagoland, selling bread to hundreds of restaurants. At the time, it seemed good to a lot of us, but that was largely because we didn't know any better. That's a little too harsh. I think some Labriola bread was quite good, but the bread scene has just grown a ton since then. Also, Labriola grew so big, that the kind of attention needed for a truly great product probably wasn't worth the effort.

Anyhow, while his bread business was printing money, owner Rich Labriola started inching into the restaurant business. First, he opened Labriola Bakery Cafe in late 2008 out by the company's headquarters in Oakbrook. Then in 2014 opened Stan's Donuts, the upscale version of the LA original that has since grown into a mini empire with a dozen or so locations. The next year, he finally opened a pizzeria/Italian restaurant in the city.

And it was there that the Chicago Pizza Club met for the final time before the Cubs fans lost their innocence and America lost its soul.

When Rich Labriola ran his baking company, he sold dozens if not hundreds of kinds of bread. Do you think a man like that would sell just one style of pizza at his pizzeria? Would I be asking that question if the answer was yes? I would not and he would not. Labriola offered three styles of pizza back in 2016, Neapolitan, Chicago thin, and deep dish. Two of them were bad. One was the best of its kind anywhere in town.

Let's start with the good news. The deep dish pizza at Labriola is incredible. Rich Labriola certainly knows how to make stellar bread and he shows it with the best crust of any deep dish pizza in Chicago, the city that invented the stuff. It had a hint of the caramelization found at Burt's and Pequod's, but here the rest of the crust is also a treat. Would happlily eat a piece of just the crust, something I can't say about Burt's in its heydey or peak Malnati's/Pizano's.

We opted for the sausage and paid the $3 to add some fennel pollen because any self-respecting Chicagoan knows you can't have too much fennel on a pizza. The sausage was great, the sauce was great, the cheese was quality. Remember I mentioned Stan's? The original Stan's, located near UCLA, is my favorite donut shop anywhere. When Rich bought the recipes, the rights and whatever else he got in the deal, he took what Stan's perfected and reinvented them with high quality ingredients. He basically did the same thing here.

I love Malnati's and Pizano's, but every jackass standing in line at the giant new Starbucks needs to walk the 0.2 miles down Michigan Avenue and get some deep dish pizza at Labriola.

Sadly, that's the only kind of pizza that people should get at Labriola. The Chicago thin crust is merely average fare. It does benefit from better ingredients than most places but the crust was dry and utterly forgettable. Now, the reality is that the crust on most thin crust places in town, even some great ones, is really there for function. But the good ones slap you in the taste buds with strong flavors that aren't present here. More importantly, the truly great old school thin crust places (Pat's, Villa Nova, Vito & Nick's) bring the flavor and a good crust. That said, almost four years have passed since our visit and I've only had deep dish on subsequent visits, so maybe things have improved.

The Neapolitan pizza was bad. I should be clear, the pizza that they called Neapolitan that wasn't actually Neapolitan was bad. It was way too thick for anyone to take it seriously as a Neapolitan pizza, but it also lacked the subtlety and quality that so many of us associate with genuinely good Neapolitan pizza. Honestly, I was so distracted by them calling this Neapolitan pizza that it's quite possible I'm not giving it a fair review. It was probably fine. Wait, no it wasn't. Look at that sloppy mess of a pie. These days, they don't sell anything they claim to be Neapolitan. They do have something called Signature Artisan Pizza. The description, Ciabatta style dough with extra virgin olive oil to develop a crispier crust, sounds potentially promising even if the ridiculous name does not. I'll never know. Deep dish 4 life!