Chicago’s Deep Dish Pizza Isn’t Fully Rooted In Chicago After All

Although it started as a staple food in Italy, pizza has evolved into several signature styles across American cities. You have New York's thin, foldable slices, Detroit's thick, square-cut dish, and New Haven's clam-topped, crispy variant. Yet, no adaptation is more controversial than the pie that came out of Chicago in the 1940s: deep-dish.

Love it or hate it (or refuse to consider it a pizza at all), you can't deny deep-dish is a staple of the Chicago food scene. But you might be surprised that the pie's origins aren't actually in Illinois (and no—they aren't in Italy either). To get the whole story, you must look to the South (perhaps even south of the border). 

Where Did Chicago’s Deep Dish Pizza Come From? 

As the story goes, the inspiration for Chicago’s deep dish pie actually came from a Texan. 

Ike Sewell grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and became an All-American player for the Texas Longhorns football team. After school, he moved to Chicago to work as a liquor distributor but desperately missed the Mexican food he remembered from home.

So, he partnered with his client and local restaurateur Ric Riccardo to open an authentic Mexican restaurant. But apparently, Sewell wasn’t much of a chef, and the few plates of Mexican food he served to Riccardo (and other investors) got everyone sick. 

Sewell couldn’t convince the others that the Mexican food business would succeed, so the partners came to a compromise: they’d open a pizza place instead. But, they wouldn’t serve the thin and crispy pies other pizzerias were firing off. Their offering would be heartier, more substantial, and uniquely American.

In 1943, the partners, alongside Rudy Malnati, Sr., founded Pizzeria Uno on the North Side and introduced a new type of pizza to the world: deep dish. This innovative pizza was like an actual “pie” (if you’ve ever had one, you know). The pizza crust had a high edge and deep surface, allowing more cheese and tomato sauce to pile up in the center, resulting in a much heftier meal. 

It doesn’t sound much like the “Mexican food” Ike was after. But, maybe the layered dish, with its warmly spiced tomato sauce, savory meats, and copious amounts of melted cheese, tasted a bit like the Tex-Mex he knew from home. 

It didn’t take long for the pizza’s popularity to spread around Chicago, and the deep-dish pie quickly became an icon in the city. More and more pizzerias started specializing in the fork-and-knife favorite, eventually developing new variations like the stuffed pizza, which adds an extra layer of dough over the cheese.

As most origin stories go, there is still some debate over who technically invented the pie (Malnati or not?). Still, Uno's website claims Sewell "created Deep Dish Pizza," and historians widely agree that the first deep-dish' za came out of Sewell and Riccardo's pizza oven.

So, technically, you can thank a Texan for bringing the deep-dish pizza style to life, even if it's been deeply rooted in the city's rich culinary history ever since. As true Chicagoans will say, deep-dish is for the tourists, anyway. Tavern-style and stuffed crust are the real favorites of Chicago's own.

And don't worry—Ol' Ike did get his Mexican food fix after all, establishing the city's first-ever Mexican restaurant, Su Casa, in 1960.