I never look for Chicago deep-dish pizza, or Chicago hot dogs, wherever I’m living because I know I can get some of the best whenever I visit my parents. The best in my original hometown? I’m still trying to figure it out. My mom likes Giordano’s, but it’s grown into a full-on chain restaurant, and the quality really varies. My dad maintains an open-door policy towards all pizzas, regardless of origin. The original Pizzeria Uno, which invented deep-dish, and nearby Pizzeria Due, are pretty good but awfully touristy. (I notice the chain is now calling itself Uno Chicago Grill… wtf??!!) Then there’s Lou Malnati’s, a laid-back neighborhood restaurant that’s actually in our neighborhood and whose pies (butter crust, please) are favorites of many a local chowhound. Unlike many pizzerias, Lou’s is pretty nice to eat in, but a friend was coming over for dinner so we got takeout.

I’m pretty fond of all legitimate forms of pizza (while scorning the bastard Thai BBQ chicken pizza and its ilk), but there’s a particular kind of satisfaction to eating the deep-dish pizza, which you cannot hope to handle without a knife and fork. The sauce is chunky — when I was researching recipes, several said it’s just reduced, broken-up canned plum tomatoes — rather than the soupy consistency spread on New York pizzas. And while I enjoy the thin-yet-puffy crust of a N.Y. pizza, charred on the bare floor of an oven, it seems austere next to its butter-or-oil slicked Chicago counterpart, virtually fried in its pan.

By family consensus, we always get spinach stuffed pizza. “Family consensus” really just means that my mom likes spinach, my dad is fine with it, and now that I’m an adult I feel guilty about eating a hunk of cheese and bread without any redeeming vegetable. So I’m not crazy about spinach pizza per se, but Malnati’s impresses me — You can really tell that these were recently individual leaves of fresh spinach, and not frozen stuff. The tomato sauce is nice and tangy, and there’s a good amount of cheese.

But the crust just doesn’t thrill me, butter or no. I have a sneaking suspicion that I prefer the towering, cracker-crisp crust at Gino’s East. It was a suspicion that I’ll have to test out on my next trip, though — we had enough leftovers from this pie for the rest of the week.

Lou Malnati’s
958 W. Wrightwood (at Sheffield & Lincoln)
Chicago
(773) 832-4030