From Eating History: How Chicago Deep Dish and Detroit Pizza Were Born!!

Adrienne and Joe share their favorite things about regional pizza tastes, including what your favorite Chicago pizzeria says about you. Then we get a taste of Eating History, the newest podcast featuring Adrienne and her husband Stephen Bailey. They dive into one of pizza’s greatest debates: how did America’s regional pizza styles emerge, and why do people defend them so fiercely? Topics Covered: The origins of Chicago deep dish pizza The partnership that launched Pizzeria Uno How deep dish challenged conventional ideas of what pizza could be The key differences between Chicago and New York pizza The rise of Detroit-style pizza and its automotive roots Regional pizza identities and rivalries across America The growth of pizza franchising and commercialization The tension between preserving tradition and expanding access Listen to Season One of Eating History now: Spotify / Apple Follow the show: @chefscutpod Follow Adrienne: @chefadriennecheatham Follow Joe: @insta.flamm

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:14Joe Flamm?

  All right, Age, we got a special one this week. We are getting into talking about our sister podcast, Eating History, giving our crew a little preview of your crew over there.

• 0:27Adrienne Cheatham?

  It's all our crew. This is the sister pod to The Chef's Cut called Eating History, which is hosted by your good friend and my good friend and my husband, Stephen Bailey. So, but you know, Stephen was a history major in undergrad. I'm a food lover. He's a food lover. So he came up with the idea of starting this Eating History podcast to really dig deep into the background on some of the stories behind food that we take for granted, but not a lot of people know. So, season one of Eating History, we dug deep into pizza, how it started, how flatbread became a thing, how it expanded across the Roman Empire,

• 1:09Adrienne Cheatham?

  how the tomato came from South America, how mozzarella got involved, how all these ingredients came together in Southern Italy, how it defined pizza, and then how it expanded across the globe, and where it's going in the future. Really exciting news also, Joe. Eating History has officially joined The Chef's Cut in the top 10 food pods in the country.

• 1:30Joe Flamm?

  Oh, let's go. Let's go. We're all coming up. I love it. I love it.

• 1:35Adrienne Cheatham?

  So The Chef's Cut, you know, in its first season hit the top 10. Now Eating History has joined it in the top 10. We're gonna run what is one of our listeners' favorite episodes from Eating History, season one, and it talks about Chicago and Detroit-style pizza, which is perfect.

• 1:51Joe Flamm?

  Love it. Midwest pizza, baby. At its finest.

• 1:55Adrienne Cheatham?

  So at this point in the, in the eating history season, pizza has expanded out of the East Coast where it was primarily brought by Italian Americans and developed and it was really a neighborhood kind of thing, mostly on the East Coast. And then after World War II, soldiers came back from Italy and they were back to Kansas. They were back to other parts of the US. And they said, we had pizza in Italy and we want pizza again.

• 2:21Joe Flamm?

  Yeah. Once, once you have pizza, you can't go back to not having pizza.

• 2:24Adrienne Cheatham?

  It's like, I need another hit.

• 2:25Joe Flamm?

  Everybody knows. Everybody knows. You know what I mean? You can't live a pizza life and then just no longer have a pizza life.

• 2:30Adrienne Cheatham?

  Right. You can't take that away. And so that's what's cool about eating history. It's not a cooking show. It's not a history lecture. It is the stories about the foods we all love and the people that developed them. And so this episode that we're going to run today talks about the development of deep dish and Detroit style pizza. And it is a wild story for both of them.

• 2:53Joe Flamm?

  It's iconic. You know what I mean? And I, I love these old school stories. I love the words of like, especially those things that were brought here where it's like people just made stuff based on what was around. You know what I mean? They saw something. It's not like they could Google a recipe. They're like, okay, how do we do this? They just like sorted it out and then it became a thing. Like you love those things.

• 3:11Adrienne Cheatham?

  And it's funny. So when you think of Detroit, besides, besides Motown, what do you think about when it comes to the city of Detroit?

• 3:19Joe Flamm?

  I mean, I always think cars.

• 3:21Adrienne Cheatham?

  Exactly. Right. And that is how Detroit pizza develops. That's a little spoiler alert, but don't worry, I'm not giving away too much. But all of these regional styles of pizza, because you and I have had this conversation about pizza before, it is hyper regional. And I know you've got Quad City, you've got all styles of pizza around you that you're familiar with. And every region tells a story about the immigrants that came to the area, the ingredients that were available to them there, and part of the local culture. So in Detroit, the automotive culture and some extra auto parts laying around are what laid the foundation for Detroit style pizza.

• 3:59Joe Flamm?

  Sounds very Detroit.

• 4:00Adrienne Cheatham?

  Blue steel pans. Let's just, let's just leave that out there.

• 4:03Joe Flamm?

  And you know, and I think it's just like even in Chicago, you know, it's neighborhood to neighborhood. You know, your favorite pizza places should be the one you grew up by. And you can usually tell where somebody's from by what their favorite pizza place is. You know, okay, yeah, I know where you grew up. I love that, you know, favorite pizza could tell you something about a person. It could tell you where they're from, how they grew up.

• 4:20Adrienne Cheatham?

  But Joe, that gets me thinking, what is your Chicago pizza? What's, what's the one you grew up on? And what's the one that you like recommend to people visiting Chicago?

• 4:29Joe Flamm?

  I grew up on Vito and Nix. I grew up two blocks away. It's, you know, it's a temple of Chicago. It's carpeting on the walls. It's cash only. It's slices so small that you have to eat 47 of them. It's just, it's no frills, old style sign in the window that's neon. It's just, it's a beautiful, wonderful, wonderful place. So it's, you know, that place will be forever in my heart. When people come to visit and they're like, where should I go? That's a harder one because I'm like, you're not going to go to where I grew up. You're not going to drive down to 84th and Belasque from, you know, I mean, the loop from the Gold Coast, wherever. So it's always about where they're staying. It's like, go somewhere by you. You know, Pizza Michi, which opened on Grand, where they do tavern style. What's Cecily and Billy are doing.

• 5:12Joe Flamm?

  They are, I mean, incredible. There's, there's, there's a place in Pilsen called Novelle Pizza that they are doing incredible stuff too, down on 18th Street.

• 5:22Adrienne Cheatham?

  Nice. You had me at Pizza Michi.

• 5:24Joe Flamm?

  Those, those are usually the ones where they're both really, really good and really, really close. Like if you want just really good quality tavern style pizza, see what it is. Those are both awesome for it. But I'm like, if you really want to see what it's about, it's like, you gotta get out to the neighborhoods. You either gotta get further south, further north, further west somewhere and go to a place that looks like the neighborhood was built around it. And you know, I mean, you know, you know, it's gonna be awesome.

• 5:46Adrienne Cheatham?

  You know, you found it. It's on. So, all right, let's get into Chef's Cut Nation. We're going to play you episode four of Eating History, talking about Chicago and Detroit pizza.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Chicago, December 1943. Here's the scene. Outside, snow swirls down Ohio Street. Wind off Lake Michigan cuts through the city like a knife. It's the kind of cold that makes your lungs ache. But in the basement at number 29, it's warm, almost too warm. Rick Ricardo stands near a cold oven, flour dusting his forearms, dough stretched across his knuckles. He's an artist and a restaurateur. Owns Ricardo's, a popular restaurant on Rush Street, where Chicago's painters and writers gather. But right now, in this basement, that smells like yeast and coal smoke. He's deep in an experiment. Ricardo moved his family into the apartment directly above the basement

• 6:47Speaker 02

  after returning from a solo trip to Italy. Ricardo grew up in northern Italy, not Naples. Pizza wasn't his thing, but he knows food and business. And for months now, he's been experimenting, living upstairs so he can work at all hours. The pizza in his hands doesn't look like anything in New York or Chicago's Little Italy. It's taller, actually much taller. He presses dough into a deep pan, building the crust up the sides like a pie shell. Then, he layers it backwards. Cheese on the bottom, chunks of cooked sausage, then thick tomato sauce on top. His business partner, Ike Sewell, a smooth-talking Texas liquor salesman, thinks pizza should be more substantial.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  A meal, not a snack, something worth a higher price. But it's Ricardo down here, night after night, working through what will become a year of experimentation. He slides the heavy pan into the cold oven. Thirty minutes, maybe longer. That's not pizza time, that's casserole time. The cast iron radiates heat. Cheese melts from the bottom up. Sauce bubbles and reduces. The crust climbs the sides of the pan, golden and buttery. When it comes out, crust two inches tall, cheese stretching in thick ropes, sauce the color of brick. It doesn't look like anyone else's pizza, and that is exactly the point.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  In New York, pizza means thin, crossed in a fold. But Chicago, Chicago's about to do something totally different, something bigger, something so different that people will argue for the next 80 years about whether it's even pizza at all. This is Eating History: Food That Changed the World, a show about the dishes that spread, evolved, and reshaped culture along the way. I'm Stephen Bailey, a history enthusiast who loves to eat.

• 8:42Adrienne Cheatham?

  And I'm chef Adrian Cheatham, a food enthusiast who loves to history. This season, we're telling the story of pizza, and this is episode four, Pizza Goes Deep.

• 8:59Adrienne Cheatham?

  Okay, well, we just heard about Rick Ricardo. Love, hate the name, by the way. But he's making something that definitely does not sound like the pizza that we've been talking about for the last three episodes. But before we get to Chicago and the whole deep-dish situation, I think we need to pull up again because our listeners need to see what's happening more broadly. When did pizza stop being just one style of pizza with toppings that varied from region to region and start becoming New York-style pizza or Chicago-style pizza?

• 9:30Speaker 02

  That's the perfect question for this episode because by the 1940s and 50s, as we discussed in the last episode, pizza's starting to branch out from New York, and that means different regional identities are forming. I mean, American cities aren't just making pizza anymore. They're kind of creating competing definitions of what pizza is. While there were a number of regional variations, this episode is going to focus on two cities that end up creating the most iconic competitors to what we know of as New York-style pizza. And I promise you, the competition will be absolutely fierce.

• 10:04Adrienne Cheatham?

  So let's quickly establish what makes New York pizza New York pizza because you already know about Lombardi's and coal ovens from the last episode. But there's really three key things here. First, thin, pliable crust that you can fold and have. Lengthwise. Second, it's sold by the slice, eaten standing up or walking. And that's important because the largely working-class clientele doesn't have time or money during lunch to buy a whole pizza. Third, it's cooked in coal ovens, 700 to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, which creates that specific char and chew. By the 40s and 50s, this is just what pizza means in New York. Dozens of pizzerias, all solving the same problems the same way.

• 10:48Adrienne Cheatham?

  And from a food science perspective, the coal oven temperature is crucial. You need dough with high protein flour to withstand that heat without burning. And you need it thin enough to cook in two to three minutes. The crust has to stay pliable because it's cooked so fast, but the inside won't have time to dry out, even though the outside gets charred.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  And by the late 1940s, New York World War II vets are coming home, moving to the suburbs, and they want pizza that they remember from before they left.

• 11:21Adrienne Cheatham?

  I mean, that train is never late, and World War II had to come in again.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Shoot you on time.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  So it's not my fault that World War II explained so much, and I'm only bringing it up because New York style spreads beyond Manhattan. It becomes an identity. But here's where it gets interesting. Chicago looks at what New York is doing and says, "We're going to do something completely different."

• 11:46Adrienne Cheatham?

  That is pretty much how we roll in Chicago.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  That is true. I can confirm.

• 11:49Adrienne Cheatham?

  So we have to start this story with two crazy characters. I mean, there's crazy people throughout pizza's history, but these two really take the pie. And I predict our listeners are really going to love these guys. So we've been talking about Rick Ricardo, but who was this guy really? And what is the story with his Texan partner, Ike Sewell?

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Okay, so these two are absolutely fantastic. Let me start with Rick. His real name is Richard Novaretti, and he was born in Italy and came to America as a ship's mate. But he wasn't just a sailor, he was really a Renaissance man, a painter, a dancer, musician. So Rick Ricardo does some craziness. He shows up in New Orleans as a ship's mate. He promptly jumped ship in New Orleans to marry a woman named Mimi. I mean, I'm from New Orleans, I can understand how that could happen. And after they get married, they move to Georgia to do what any newlyweds would do, work as dancers.

• 12:41Adrienne Cheatham?

  I feel like we missed that chapter in our marriage, but, you know. That is still just the tip of the Rick Ricardo iceberg story, I feel. I feel like there's more to it.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  You'd be corrected, it's the tip of the iceberg. This man is just getting started. I mean, actually, they eventually make their way to Chicago, where Rick tries his hand at several things. Selling paintings, working in magazine publishing, running a speakeasy during prohibition. Of course, Chicago at the time, makes sense. But he finally settles on opening Ricardo's Restaurant on Rush Street in 1934. And of course, he paints three massive female nudes and mounts two of them on the ceiling, surrounded by light bulbs.

• 13:21Adrienne Cheatham?

  Of course he did. I mean, given everything that you've told me about this guy, it kind of tracks. But I love that he was bringing all of his passions together under one roof.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  He was indeed. He's like, let's just get it all in one place. And I gotta kind of respect it. So, we haven't seen, really, this much audacity since our friend, a piece just from episode one, I would say. I mean, the place became famous as this bohemian hangout for artists and writers. Rick let his artist friends hang their work on the walls for sale. He commissioned seven huge murals called the Seven Lively Arts to go above the bar, which he then designed in the shape of an artist palette. So the place was dubbed the Mo Mart of the Midwest. I mean, this was not a guy who did anything conventionally.

• 14:04Adrienne Cheatham?

  This is the same guy, though, who's eventually going to invent deep-dish pizza. The artist with the nude paintings on his ceiling. I mean, I guess greatness comes in many forms, even nudes. And in all seriousness, it kind of makes some sense when you think about it, because he's someone who sees food as art. He's willing to experiment, and he doesn't care about rules, as we saw. But his partner, Ike Sewell, is a completely different character. Ike is from Will's Point, Texas, a tiny town in East Texas. He played football at the University of Texas and made the All-American team as a guard. He's a big, physical guy and after college, he worked for American Airlines, then became a liquor salesman.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  So we've got the flamboyant Italian artist and the Texas football player liquor salesman. Now we need to know, how did these two characters actually meet?

• 14:54Adrienne Cheatham?

  Well, in true restaurant industry fashion, it brings people together and Ike was selling liquor to restaurants. His route included Ricardo's, so they became friends. And here's where the story gets even crazier.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Wait, it gets crazy?

• 15:07Adrienne Cheatham?

  Even crazier. According to Ike, he originally pitched Rick on opening a Mexican restaurant. Ike really missed the Mexican food from Texas he grew up with and thought there would be a market for it in Chicago. So they leased this basement space at 29 East Ohio and Ricardo starts painting bullfighting murals on the wall. Now, Rick is an Italian and had never actually eaten Mexican food, so Ike's bartender decided to make him some. But Rick gets violently ill, I mean, completely sick. He later says that it was the worst meal and experience he ever had in his entire life. He was so upset that he emptied out the cash register, took off to Italy for two or three months and nobody could find him.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  So I'm sure you're probably wondering, doesn't this guy have like a family and a restaurant? Does he just like vanish and leave them behind? The answer would be yes, he just bolts and he takes all the money. Meanwhile, Ike's sitting there with this vacant Mexican restaurant with bullfight paintings on the walls and he's kind of wondering what to do next. So tell us how we go from empty Mexican restaurant to the fathers of deep dish pizza.

• 16:16Adrienne Cheatham?

  Well, okay, so Rick eventually returns. He wanders back from Italy, he's broke, he's disillusioned. He says, you know what, forget Mexican food, we're doing pizza.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Of course he does.

• 16:28Adrienne Cheatham?

  I mean, what else would you do? And this is the point where we started the episode, right? Full circle again, Ike agrees to do the pizza concept if Rick can come up with something that is different from New York style or Neapolitan. It needs to be substantial, substantial enough to warrant a sit-down meal, but still be recognizable as pizza. So that's when Rick goes into the Mexican restaurant Basement Lab and came up with what would become known as deep dish pizza. So if you're coming to the conclusion, as I know you are, that deep dish pizza only exists because Mexican food made Rick Ricardo sick, you are correct.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  As always, there's a little nuance in this story. I mean, even though we talk about Rick as the creator of deep dish, there's probably a little more collaboration than the story implies. There was a cook named Alice May Redman, who probably contributed. There was also a Sicilian employee named Connie Picanato, who helped refine the recipe. But yeah, I mean, the Mexican food disaster is at the center of the story of deep dish.

• 17:30Adrienne Cheatham?

  Okay, so I get it that they're making this deep dish pizza and everything is sort of reversed, which I love, you know? In New York, you've got thin dough, then sauce, then cheese, cooked in two minutes. Chicago deep dish, thick dough in a deep pan, like an inch or more, pressed up the sides. Then cheese goes directly on the dough. Then toppings of your choice. Then a thick layer of sauce on top. And it bakes for 30 to 45 minutes, which is why you need more sauce. But baking it for that long completely changes the texture that we're familiar with. With that much time in the oven and cheese being insulated by the sauce, you're not getting a crispy cheese.

• 18:12Adrienne Cheatham?

  You're getting this molten, gooey layer in the center that basically steams up and melts under the sauce. And the crust becomes more like biscuit dough. It's buttery, it's almost flaky on the outside and soft in the centers of it. It's structurally more like a pie or a quiche than pizza.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  I mean, you definitely can't fold it. I mean, you can't eat it walking. You need a plate, a fork, a knife. You need to sit down, which is exactly what Ike wanted. I mean, he wanted to charge more and you can't charge more for street food. You kind of charge more for a meal. So this is a business decision as much as it is a food innovation. And it really took a while to catch on. They opened in 1943 and at first it flopped. I mean, people would come in and say, we've seen pizza in Italy and this isn't it. So I probably would have been one of those people. But Ike started cutting pieces and giving them away for free at the bar. They had to refinance the place. Three times in the first year, they were this close to almost being close.

• 19:09Adrienne Cheatham?

  I mean, a lot of restaurants close within the first year. It's a sad reality. But eventually their plan worked and by the late 1940s, Pizzeria Uno had standing room only. Ike opened a second location in 55, called it, of course, Pizzeria Due. And then when Rick died in 54, Ike became the sole owner and built it into an empire. He kept his day job, though, at the liquor company as a VP for 22 years while still running the pizzeria. But here's another really interesting thing. For decades, Ike refused every franchise offer. People wanted to open Unos all over the country, but he just kept saying no. He wanted to keep it local and keep it special.

• 19:50Adrienne Cheatham?

  It wasn't until 1978 that he finally agreed to let someone open a test location in Boston. Cold weather, heavy pizza makes sense. But it was such a success there that by 1980, he started franchising. And that's when Deep Dish really went national and grew outside of Chicago. Today, there's over 100 locations around the world and the chain is now called Uno Pizzeria and Grill. But you can find them everywhere, from Boston to Dubai. So what started in one basement in Chicago became a global empire. All because Mexican food made Rick Ricardo sick.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  So here's what's interesting. The way that Uno approaches it with Ike is not just about the invention. It's also about how quickly it grows. And so that's a theme we're going to see. Invention and then what's the business model you actually put around the invention to talk about what happens to that particular restaurant over time. And there are going to be many different versions of it. So New York has its thing, Chicago has its thing, but there's at least one more city we need to talk about. And that city is Detroit. And I know all the Detroiters out there are like, you better talk about Detroit. So we've even got a little Detroit pizza here as a foreshadowing. Detroit's story is different because it's not about artists or football players. It's about an immigrant trying to make his struggling bar work. And this Guy is Gus Ware.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  And he's born in San Marino, which is that tiny country inside of Italy. And he came to Detroit in 1929 at age 21 with only $70 in his pocket.

• 21:26Adrienne Cheatham?

  Wow. And in our research, we found that this poor guy came to the US seven months before the Great Depression hit. So he's got a wicked sense of timing.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  He worked as eventually a tile setter. He was able to find a job, hustler. Then he's a laborer at Ford's plant. He gets married to a woman named Anna, whose family comes from Sicily. And in the 1940s, he and Anna's family saved up enough money to buy a little bar called Buddy's Rondi. I mean, it had a bocce ball court and a loyal set of customers. But what it didn't have was a profitable business. I mean, it was making no money.

• 22:00Adrienne Cheatham?

  So much like Ike and Rick's bar, their bar wasn't making money. And let me guess, pizza saves the day.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Eventually, you would be correct. But there's a little more to the story for us. So Anna's mother, a Sicilian immigrant named Celia, had a recipe for a thick Sicilian pizza. So Gus and Anna start experimenting. But here's the problem. Gus doesn't have the right pans. And he needs something that is kind of deep and rectangular.

• 22:25Adrienne Cheatham?

  Ah, so this is where Detroit's auto industry finally comes in, right?

• 22:29Speaker 02

  That's right. The auto industry comes to the rescue. Gus takes some pans from work. These are blue steel pans that were used as drip trays or to hold spare parts in auto factories. They're industrial pans. They were never meant for cooking, but they're thick steel, almost like cast iron. And they're the perfect size and shape.

• 22:48Adrienne Cheatham?

  And those pans completely change how the pizza cooks. That blue steel retains heat at an insane level. And it develops a seasoning over time, just like you said, much like cast iron does. But when you press dough into that pan and put cheese all the way to all four sides, the cheese that touches the steel caramelizes. It gets crispy, lacy, almost burnt, but in the best possible way. And people in Detroit call those edges frico. They have a name.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  I want to know how they came up with frico.

• 23:19Adrienne Cheatham?

  And those edges became the signature. Sorry, I don't have that for you today. But people fight over corner pieces because they have the most. And the square shape means that you can cut it so that everybody gets edges. And Gus is using Wisconsin brick cheese instead of mozzarella. It's got a higher fat content, which makes it even better for caramelizing and getting that beautiful crust. Plus, they put the sauce on in stripes after it comes out of the oven so it stays fresh and bright instead of cooking down. Every single choice is about maximizing what that industrial pan can do.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  So I'm going to become a Detroit-er and say my favorite part of this poster is the frico around it. So it works. Detroiters start driving across town to get this pizza. Gus sold Buddy's in 1953 and opened another place called Cloverleaf, still making the same pizza. It's so popular that other Buddy's employees branch out and start their own places. I mean, it stays local for decades as a Detroit secret. And that's the interesting part. Unlike Rick and Ike's Pizzeria Uno, Gus's Detroit pizza doesn't become the basis for a large global pizza empire. It stays local and spreads through a number of restaurants, most of which are not owned by Gus and his family. So once again, business choices affect how the invention spreads and who spreads it.

• 24:39Adrienne Cheatham?

  So by this time, in the late 1940s, we have three completely different pizzas with three completely different origin stories. New York, thin, foldable, sold by the slice. Chicago, thick, fork and knife, casserole-like, if you want to say that. Detroit is square with crispy edges and industrial pans. But if you're thinking that people are going to start arguing about those versions and which is correct, yeah, you would be absolutely right.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Did I just hear you say casserole and deep dish in the same sentence?

• 25:15Adrienne Cheatham?

  I said casserole-like.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  I mean, this is, I'm learning so much making this show with you, I have to say. We got the margarita, we got the casserole comments. You're not going to be able to go back to Chicago. I digress. Once you have distinct regional styles, you have something to defend. I mean, something to take pride in. And when someone from another city says, "That's not real pizza," I mean, it kind of becomes personal. It's not just about food anymore. It's identity, place, even who you are. So I guess this is the point where I should disclose something that you already know well, but our listeners do not. I think deep dish is delicious. When you were talking about it, I was like, "That's delicious." But it's just not pizza.

• 25:53Adrienne Cheatham?

  Okay, why do you have to bring that up? I am aware of your unfortunate stance on this. And I'm not going to dignify that and take the bait. So I'm just going to move on. And although it's disappointing, I must say I love you in spite of your backwards views on my pizza.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  You called it a casserole. You called it a casserole.

• 26:11Adrienne Cheatham?

  There's actually a famous story about Jon Stewart going on a rant on The Daily Show, calling Deep Dish, quote, "a pizza casserole." So you're not alone, even though you're both wrong. But he also said it's an above-ground marinara swimming pool for rats. And Chicago politicians actually responded. They took the bait. But they defended their pizza on the floor of the city council, and I'm so glad they did. But this is all a very American thing, right? You know, in America, we love to compete and argue, especially when it comes to our regional specialties.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  I want to say the swimming pool for rats was a bit too far. I do not agree with that. A casserole, yes, but I can't take it that far. Not only do we like to argue, we like to market. And by the 1950s, someone's going to figure out how to take these regional pizzas and scale them up. I'm talking about making them consistent, franchisable, available everywhere, turning pizza really into a product instead of a place-based food. Because they're not interested in tradition, or authenticity, or regional pride, they're interested in consistency, scalability, and profit. They're going to turn pizza into a product you can buy in Kansas, or Montana, or anywhere else. Same dough, same sauce, same pizza, every single time.

• 27:22Adrienne Cheatham?

  And regional pizza purists are going to hate this, even more than they hate the different versions of pizza that they're all arguing against all the time. But millions of Americans are going to love it. And that tension between people who want pizza to stay regional and special, and people who just want pizza to be accessible, that's going to define the next 50 years of pizza history. Next time, pizza goes national. The franchise wars begin, and two different versions of America go to war over what pizza is even supposed to be.