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Chicago is famous for many things: tall buildings, great universities, a history of organized crime, and deep-dish pizza.
The two goliaths in this game are Giordano's and Lou Malnati's. I'm no deep-dish expert, but I had my share of the dense, cheesy pie during my college years in the Chicago area. Deep-dish was the pizza of choice at most gatherings, unfortunately for me as I am lactose-intolerant.
Aside from the fact that deep-dish always made me feel sick, I remembered thinking Giordano's was slightly better than Lou Malnati's. But that might have just been because people ate it more.
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In general, I never saw what all the fuss was about. Deep-dish just never tasted that good to me.
After years of being away from Chicago - and from deep-dish - I was ready to give both another spin. On a recent stopover through the city, armed with a handful of Lactaid, I went to both Giordano's and Lou Malnati's to compare their deep-dish pizza.
I arrived at Giordano's in Chicago's River North neighborhood just after 1 p.m.
It was a chilly Chicago day, and I hadn't eaten since I left New York, so I was ready for some piping hot pizza.
Even though it was lunchtime, the cavernous restaurant was fairly empty.
Tall red vinyl booths, modern wood-and-steel tables, and exposed brick made the space feel like a contemporary twist on classic pizza parlor decor.
I took a seat by the window and ordered a house salad ($5.25) and a small size of "The Special" ($24.35), which feeds three.
Soon, my waiter was back with my salad and a bottle of San Pellegrino.
I didn't read the description too closely, but this wasn't what I expected when I ordered a house salad.
Still, this was the good kind of surprise.
Cherry tomatoes, fresh fennel, and shaved asiago over mesclun made this salad feel much fancier than expected.
It tasted much fancier, too.
Unlike the typical crouton-infested piles of soggy romaine in a typical house salad, this one tasted like real veggies.
The greens weren't the freshest, but the combination of ingredients was a winning one.
The tomatoes were tart, the fennel fragrant, and the asiago aromatic.
Although I was here for the pizza, I couldn't help but devour the salad. It went down easy.
Soon, my small "Special" deep-dish pizza arrived, and my waiter dragged a slice from the pie onto a plate.
It's me you have to show: how deep is your dish?
The "Special" pizza contains sausage, mushrooms, onions, and green peppers.
According to the Giordano's menu, just one slice contains 550-602 calories. That's a third of my average daily caloric needs.
But the perfect cheese pull has no calories.
And Giordano's pizza is mostly cheese. Mozzarella cheese, to be exact.
The other two dominant flavors in this pizza were tomato sauce and buttery crust.
The other ingredients didn't make much of an appearance.
If you like cheese, butter, and nothing but cheese and butter, Giordano's is the pizza for you.
But I found the thick, gooey mozzarella to be kind of bland. The tomato sauce was sweet, but otherwise not very flavorful.
And the thick crust, though buttery, gets kind of soggy.
I was disappointed that the toppings seemed to just melt into the mozzarella. Where were my peppers? My sausages?
At the end of my first slice, I still felt unsatisfied. I wasn't sure if it was the amount of food or just the flavor of it.
Either way, I was starting to find the pizza boring. I doused it in parmesan to make it more interesting.
Most of my "small" pie still awaited my fork, cooling swiftly on its pedestal.
I lifted myself another slice. Note: as fun as cheese pulls are, they're pretty messy.
But no sooner had I taken a bite of slice two than I started to feel that familiar queasiness in my stomach.
The pizza started to taste how I felt.
After a few more bites of dense, elastic cheese, I gave up and asked for a box.
As I waited for my check, I wondered if there was a point at which I could feel full but not sick from eating deep-dish.
I enjoyed digging into this ungodly pile of cheese, sauce, and buttery dough. But it's something I'd do once a decade.
I couldn't see myself craving Giordano's anytime soon.
The next day, I went to Lou Malnati's for a late lunch/early dinner.
I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast — which was a cold leftover slice of Giordano's — so I was ravenous.
Lou Malnati's is considerably flashier than Giordano's.
The entrance leads to a gift shop — something that always turns me off a restaurant.
But down the stairs was a homey, elegant space with brick archways, wooden tables, and green vinyl booths.
Lou Malnati's has two special pizzas, the "Malnati" and the "Lou". I went for a small size of the "Lou" ($18.75) and a house salad ($6.95).
My house salad arrived shortly along with a bottle of Perrier. I'd asked for San Pellegrino for consistency's sake, but eh, sparkling water's all the same.
This is what I expect when I order a house salad.
Romaine: check. Croutons: check. Copious dressing: check. Tiny amount of other vegetables: do I have to say it?
Everything in this salad was just slightly less fresh than their Giordano's counterparts.
I think I saw some carrot shavings poking out of dry and wilted leaves.
But surprisingly, thanks to the Malnati sweet onion vinaigrette, the whole shebang actually tasted pretty good.
However, it wasn't so good that I felt compelled to eat more.
After all, nothing in this salad really had any nutritional value.
I decided to skip the rest of the salad and wait for my pizza to come out.
And when it came out, I was glad I waited.
It looked so much more colorful, more flavorful, and more wholesome than Giordano's pizza was.
But the true test of any food is taste, not looks. I was ready to judge this pizza for what was inside.
Inside the "Lou" is spinach, garlic, basil, onion, mushrooms, and tomatoes. Unlike Giordano's "Special", the "Lou" is vegetarian.
But what the "Lou" lacks in meat, it makes up for with three kinds of cheese.
And unlike its counterpart at Giordano's, this pizza showcased its toppings at all levels — in and on top of its cheese.
The crust of this pizza is thinner, crunchier, and yeastier.
The cheese didn't pull as beautifully as the cheese on the Giordano's pizza had.
But it tasted a million times better. Who'da thunk putting more than one kind of cheese on a pizza would make it taste good?
Everything about this pizza tasted like normal pizza, only better, thanks to its dynamic combo of textures and flavors.
Each bite was a perfect balance of crunch, cheese, and aromatic veggies.
This pizza was so good I didn't miss the sausage in Giordano's pizza, which had been barely noticeable anyway.
What a difference a slice of tomato, a touch of garlic, and creative cheesing make.
As I neared the end of my first slice, which was a full quarter of the pizza, I didn't feel any of the queasiness and discomfort I'd come to expect from eating deep-dish.
Instead, I felt comfortably full. I asked for boxes so I could bring my leftovers on my plane.
With my plate nearly empty, I wondered how I could have gotten Lou Malnati's so very wrong.
Lou Malnati's pizza isn't slightly inferior to Giordano's. It's much, much better.
I realized that I'd disliked deep dish all these years simply because I'd only been eating Giordano's.
But forget Giordano's. Lou Malnati's pizza made me realize that deep-dish shouldn't make you feel like death. Most importantly, deep-dish can — and should — taste like really, really good pizza.
