CPC invaded Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream on Saturday, July 16, 2022.
The story behind the pizza part of Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream is pretty cool. Two longtime friends and the fiancé of one of them joined forces to create Eat Free Pizza, through which they gave out free pizza and beer one night a week via Instagram. Check out the back story here. The combination of working on their craft and getting a boatload of social media and real media love enabled them to open up a permanent home in Bridgeport that they share with Kimski (next door) for fried chicken and Pretty Cool Ice Cream (Logan Square) for ice cream pops.
They've gotten a ton of praise since then and have expanded to long-term pop-ups (like the one currently at Marz) and just opened a second permanent location in Westmont, Kim's Uncle Pizza. Esquire even named it one of the best new restaurants in America in 2020. Now we've got to pump the brakes a little bit. Given that Pizza Friendly Pizza, Professor Pizza, and Milly's Pizza In The Pan all opened in Chicago 2020 and are all significantly better than PFCIC, the idea that this is one of the best new restaurants in the country is batshit crazy. Either that or the fried chicken is life-changing, in which case I need to get back ASAP.
In a CPC first, we actually began our meeting with something from a different pizzeria than the one we were meeting at. Stelios is currently between homes (pro tip: don't sell your condo months before the house you're building is ready) and is living on the far south side, minutes away from Chicago tavern style legend Vito & Nick's. Since we knew we'd be eating on an outdoor patio at Maria's, we got him to bring us a sausage pie from Vito & Nick's.
Good Lord, even at room temperature, this is just a fantastic pie. And that fennel-packed sausage just oozes Chicago pizza vibes. Magical.
Back in my prolific pizza eating days when I wrote for Serious Eats, I occasionally got into debates with the pizza nerds who were appalled that I firmly believed that a pizza could be great even with a mediocre crust. Exhibit A were the many great tavern crust places throughout Chicago and the Midwest. That being said, the three tavern crust pizzas that were truly special - Vito & Nick's, Pat's, and Villa Nova, all had crusts that were a cut above.
The pizza at Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream does not have a special crust. It's fine, but it's effectively just an edible plate. I would have liked it to be crisper (the edges were great) but nobody else seemed to agree with me.
The toppings are a different story. The ones we had were top notch. We were not able to try their sausage because for the first time in visiting literally hundreds of pizzerias in Chicago, I encountered a place that was sold out of sausage. This wasn't a case of them running out late at night - they sent all of their sausage (an ingredient that's incredibly easy to buy or make) to their pop-up at Marz. Truly baffling. And by baffling, I mean stupid.
Bitter old man grumpiness aside, as I said, the toppings we had were great. One pizza was pepperoni and mushroom and the other was spicy sopressata, garlic and Mike's hot honey. Everything was high quality and they didn't hold back in piling them on. And that latter combo, one I haven't had before, was a gamechanger that I will be trying again multiple times at multiple pizzerias.
All in all, this was good stuff. I had really high hopes that weren't met, but that just means this isn't destination pizza. If I lived in the neighborhood (won't happen) or they opened a location in my neighborhood (seems unlikely), I'd be absolutely thrilled to have this as a regular stop.
The obvious plan was to have some of Pretty Cool Ice Cream's excellent ice cream pops at the end of the meal. But we all live a whole lot closer to their north side locations than we do to Mario's so the genius decision was made to go there instead since we were relatively close, or at least a lot closer than any of us normally are. It was a good call.
Tavern style pizza and Italian lemonade. Now that's a fine Chicago summer night.
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