CPC invaded Kim's Uncle Pizza on Wednesday, March 29, 2023.
Kim's Uncle Pizza inspired a lot of thoughts about so-called tavern pizza, many of which are barely related. So this review is going to long, disjointed and unedited. I apologize to nobody.
But I don't want the most important thing to be buried. Kim's Uncle Pizza, a new pizzeria in Westmont, IL, is making truly outstanding old school Midwestern thin crust pizza. I can't say it's the best based on one visit, but I'm confident it's in the conversation. The rich tomato sauce is great, the toppings are top notch across the board and generously applied, and the crust, usually a weakness for the style, is one of the better ones around. That's really all that matters at the end of the day so feel free to stop reading here. Or skip to the end where the pictures and detailed descriptions are. Here come the many digressions.
Tavern cut pizza is having it's national moment and there's a lot of misinformation out there
1) Tavern cut is a recently made up name. I suppose some people might have used it a while ago, but it wasn't widespread at all. Until pizza obsessives made pizza the subject of a national food discourse, we just called it thin crust and it was cut in squares just because that's the way it's been done for decades. In Chicago and much of the Midwest, thin crust is tavern cut and tavern cut is thin crust.
2) Chicago is not the only place that has tavern cut pizza and there's no reason to think it was invented here. I've personally had tavern cut thin crust pizza from decades-old places in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri and Nebraska. And I know there are places as far east as western New York. That's a wide swath of the country. I'm about as big a Chicago partisan as there is and it's clear that calling this a uniquely Chicago style or even naming it after Chicago as some are doing, is absurd.
3) There is no definitive version of the style. While most people who've spent a lot of time tasting different thin crust pizzas in Chicago (including me) agree that the best versions have a really thin cracker crust, the fact is that most places are closer to regular thickness thin crust and crumbly more than crackery.
4) The reason texture is so critical in differentiating between pizzas in this style is that the crust exists to function as an edible plate and to add texture. Crisper crusts add more textural contrast.
5) One thing that these crusts don't do, even in the top places like Vito & Nick's and Pat's and Villa Nova and, yes, Kim's Uncle, is add much in terms of flavor. I'd happily eat the crust from George's or Labriola or Spacca Napoli as a plain piece of bread. The same cannot be said for any traditional Midwestern thin crust pizza.
6) Since the flavor of the crust doesn't matter and every place uses relatively similar shredded low moisture mozzarella, the key to great thin crust pizza in this style is the sauce and the toppings. And in those two categories, there are a ton of thin crust places in Chicago that excel. There are plenty of mediocre places that are making fantastic Italian sausage and there are probably dozens of places that make a fantastic tomato sauce loaded with umami (either thanks to slow cooking sauce for hours longer than is standard on other styles of pizza and/or adding flavor boosters like tomato paste).
7) The idea that thin crust is the "real Chicago style pizza" and that deep dish is for tourists is unadulterated bullshit. There are certainly parts of the city, most notably the white portions of the south side, where this style has been the local go-to for decades. But deep dish and some of it's offshoots have been wildly popular for decades in neighborhoods far off the tourist beat. Uno's and Due's and Gino's East thrived in downtown long before culinary exploration was a central part of tourism. Lou Malnati's, which is without question the most successful deep dish chain, started in Lincolnwood, was primarily a suburban mini-chain for more than 20 years (started in 1971 and by 1984 had five locations, just one of which was in the city). Today, Malnati's has dozens of locations all over the Chicago area and only a small handful are in areas tourists go to. Pequod's and Burt's both started in Morton Grove; Gulliver's (RIP) was in West Ridge; and while Pizano's opened downtown, it was on a stretch of State Street that was definitely not tourist central. And the hottest new places on the deep dish scene are nowhere near downtown or any other tourist destination. George's Deep Dish is in Edgewater, Milly's Pizza in the Pan is in Uptown; and Uncle Jerry's Pizza Company is in bumblefuck Cary, IL. Seriously, if you take nothing else from this post, make it this: if anyone tells you that deep dish pizza is only for tourists or something "real Chicagoans" rarely eat, know that you are talking to someone who genuinely has no clue what the fuck they're talking about.
8) Nobody knows the full history of thin crust pizza in Chicago and they probably never will. In today's pizza (and food) obsessed world, it's natural that the chroniclers out there want there to be neat narratives. The problem with that is that in many cases, including the world of Chicago thin crust, you're talking about something that developed entirely organically and without rules from longstanding traditions or culinary school and during a time when people ate food without feeling the need to pontificate or memorialize. The recent New York Times piece states as fact that "the cheap-to-produce, thirst-inducing style was invented to encourage customers to linger long enough to order another beer." It's a cute narrative but there's a reason why the Times doesn't offer a single shred of evidence to support the claim: there isn't any.
Ultimately, none of this matters; what matters is whether the places making square cut thin crust pizza are making something delicious. And in the case of Kim's Uncle, they definitely are. And with that, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
The Review
The raves about the new place couldn't be ignored and when the aforementioned Times piece sang the Kim's Uncle's praises, Kate proposed a meeting and I, of course, jumped at the idea. And so it was that on Saturday, March 18, we headed to Westmont for an impromptu CPC meeting. What's that, you say? I've already said the meeting was on March 29? You are correct, dear reader. Let me tell you a story about some genuinely fucked up customer service. It's not mentioned anywhere on Kim's Uncle's website, but the way to get their pizza is to call the day you want to go and place an order for a time slot that night. I repeat: this information is not on their website. It's also not on their Instagram. They are fully aware of their reputation and fully aware they were featured in the New York Times. They have to know people are going to make the drive from Chicago. Westmost is a long way away. 45 minutes or more each way from anywhere east of Western Avenue. When we got there at 5:45, we were told we wouldn't be able to get a pizza until 8:15. I'd gotten over it, but writing this now has me enraged again. There's no excuse for that. This is a company that was built on social media. They know how to get the word out.
Anyhow, because Westmont is also home to Katy's Dumplings, we still had a wildly successful evening. And because we were eager to try the pizza and now knew the rules, we made the decision to go back just a week and a half later. I called multiple times early that afternoon until someone picked up a little after 3:00.
My persistence paid off and, pizza friends, I'm happy to report that despite all the frustration, with our first bites of pizza at Kim's Uncle, we knew we made the right decision. Side note: it's a good thing we were a small group as the restaurant only has two four-person booths inside that are on opposite sides of the restaurant and one table outside.
There were just five participants in this meeting, one of whom only got leftovers. But the reviews were universal: Kim's Uncle Pizza is absolutely fantastic. If it weren't for a couple of twists like a sprinkle of fresh parm and a couple of toppings like Mike's hot honey, you'd swear you were eating pizza from people who have been doing it right for decades.
At the Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream meeting, we had a spicy sopressata, garlic and Mike's hot honey pizza. I said in that review that it was my first time having that combo and that I absolutely loved it. Same ingredients but on a perfectly cooked pizza with a quality cracker crust and it was, not surprisingly, even better this time around.
One bite into the sausage on the half sausage/half sausage and giardiniera pizza and I was blown away. Chicago is blessed with a litany of pizzerias with fantastic sausage and this stuff is on par with the absolute best of the bunch. An absolute flavor explosion of fennelly and peppery pork. Normally I'm not a fan of giardiniera on high quality pizza because I worry it will overwhelm everything but the sausage and the intense tomato sauce were able to handle the JP Graziano's giardiniera with no problems. I'm not sure which half of this pie I liked better but both were stellar.
Like the other two pizzas, the mushroom pie was loaded with quality toppings and cooked perfectly. There was a bit too much oregano for my tastes, but I'm not sure if they added too much or if it was the regular amount in the sauce and it came through a lot more because of the less flavorful toppings. Either way, I think this was just a one-off heavy hand. To be clear, this quibble is not a major one. I would have happily eaten the entire pizza.
So there you have it: Kim's Uncle is officially one of the best places in Chicagoland for the kind of old school thin crust pizza people in the know have been raving about for years and the coasts are just learning to appreciate. Every pizza fan in Chicago should try it at least once. Whether it's worth a return drive way the hell out to Westmont is something I've been thinking about a lot for the last week. Let me put it this way: Katy's is my favorite Chinese restaurant in Chicagoland and I only get there about once a year. So it's not a knock on Kim's Uncle if I never go back; it's just the practical reality that there are so many great places for pizza that are so much more conveniently located, that I might not and it definitely won't be in my regular rotation. That being said, I'm very much liking the idea of getting some Dan Dan Noodles and cold Szechuan noodles at Katy's and following it up with a pizza or two from Kim's Uncle and having one amazing two-part meal in Westmont followed by a few meals of leftovers in Chicago. But it won't happen any time soon and it definitely won't happen until they implement a reasonable system for placing orders.
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