Chicago Style Pizza

The Stuffed Pizza at Chicago Style Pizza is a pie built inside another pie — dough pressed up the sides, then sauce, toppings, and a cheese blend, sealed under a second layer of dough and finished with more sauce across the top. The menu asks for thirty minutes, and that number sets the tempo for the whole table. This is deep dish treated as an occasion rather than a quick slice: the order a group on Hamilton Mountain settles in around, served from a long-standing Italian kitchen on Upper Sherman Avenue, just off Concession Street.

The named pies carry their own character. The Chicago Special arrives under Italian sausage, green pepper, and mushroom; the Shack Special comes fully dressed in pepperoni, green pepper, mushroom, onion, and green olive; the Cosmopolitan, the vegetarian option, layers tomato, black olive, onion, fresh garlic, and hot pepper. They come in two formats — a six-slice ten-inch and a ten-slice fourteen-inch — both generous enough that sharing is the assumption rather than the exception. The menu's true oddity is the Pizza Sub, an open-face submarine under garlic butter, pizza sauce, and mozzarella that the kitchen calls its own invention, carried north from Chicago.