1518 W Chicago Avenue, Chicago IL 60622 (Armour Street/Greenview Avenue); 312-929-3615; paulaandmonicas.com The Skinny: Worthy newcomer with an unusual "Combo" hybrid pie that combines Italian beef and pizza Price: 10-inch Combo, $10; 14-inch Combo, $17
As happens every spring in the midst of the NBA, NHL, NCAA sports championship hoopla, mayors in every major city hunker down and waste public tax dollars trying to feed the PR machine with cheeky side bet offerings of their particular cities culinary offerings. Just before the Blackhawks–Canucks game, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley promised Vancouver's mayor Red Hot Chicago hot dogs, Red Hots candies, and Goose Island Brewery's new Red Felt beer if the the Blackhawks lost. They didn't, and I don't know what we get in turn from Vancouver, but with all the TV shows filmed there and the proximity to the water, probably some old X-Files props and a bag of fish.
Serious Eats contributor Daniel Zemans checks in with another piece of intel on the Windy City pizza scene. Daniel also blogs about Chicagoland pizza with his friends on the Chicago Pizza Club blog. —The Mgmt.
Cheogajip
8273 W Golf Road, Niles IL 60714 (map); 847-583-1582; cheogajip.co.kr Getting There: Drive Pizza Style: Apparently, this is Korean pizza Oven Type: Gas The Skinny: The nicest thing I can say about the pizza is that people should go to Cheogajip for the chicken Price: 12-inch pizzas, $10.99 to $12.99; fried chicken, $10.99 to $15.99
I had so much fun with the toppings I had last week at Ian’s Pizza (reviewed here for Slice) that I decided to press my luck again this week with a trip out to Niles, a northwestern suburb of Chicago with a significant Korean population. The purpose was to go to Cheogajip (pronounced chuh - ga - jeep), the Chicagoland outpost of the Korean megachain (over 1,200 strong). I think this was Cheogajip's fourth location on these shores. The first two U.S. locations opened in the Virginia suburbs of D.C. (Annandale in October 2005 and Centreville in March 2006). A third location has been in Flushing, Queens, since April 2006, and the Niles outpost opened in the summer of 2007. There are other locations in the U.S. that operate under the name Pizza and Chicken Love Letter, but I'm unclear as to the relationship between those places and Cheogajip, but I do know that the name is not the English translation of Cheogajip, which actually means something along the lines of "wife's family's house."
I’m not sure about the other U.S. locations, but the Niles restaurant is an independently owned franchise, and our server said the menu was identical to the locations in Korea. Presumably also part of the Korean Cheogajip experience is the panchan, which here consists of a plate of coleslaw and a bowl of pickled daikon radish. The coleslaw is shredded cabbage topped with a staggering amount of Thousand Island dressing and some corn kernels. People who, like me, can enjoy an occasional overdose of Thousand Island, will be just fine with slaw, but others may want to pass. I was more appreciative of the pickled radish, although it was on the sweet side. The menu is almost exclusively in Korean—the names of the 11 dishes (six chicken and five pizza) are in English, but the descriptions are in Korean. What the menus failed to mention is that the chicken is excellent, but the pizza is not very good.
You can get it at The Pizza Company, a Thai chain. I haven’t tried it yet. But I just might have to. One interesting detail: it’s served with cheese sauce on the side. (In case you need even more cheese! Presumably there’s no bacon on the side, since there’s “double bacon” in the crust.)
"But I might just have to"? Might? Come on, Mr. Purnell, you have to try it. We'd love to see some actual pictures of this thing.
Laura Hoopes at the Christian Science Monitor recalls growing up pizza-deprived in Charlotte, North Carolina:
I had never heard of pizza when Jeanne first mentioned it, so I asked my mom if she knew what it was. She said no, but she had read about it in a recent magazine article. She took the magazine out and we read that it was a pie with tomato sauce, some kind of meat, and cheese.
Mom said she would try to make one. She produced a pie—in the sense of an apple pie—made with a crust containing tomato sauce and a meatloaf-like filling made with ground beef, which was topped with melted American cheese.
After real pizza finally came to town, her family had to rename their creation: Burger Pie, which sounds about right (or wrong). If you're curious, the recipe is included with Hoopes's recollections.
Of course, Charlotte is now home to Pie Town, renown baker (and author) Peter Reinhart's new joint.
This past weekend, there was a Ramen-Off contest in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Kitchen. Contestants in the Ramen-Off had to repurpose this stuff of cheap meals, with an eye toward creativity and deliciousness.
The ramen dish above, made by Karol Lu, uses the noodles as pizza crust. As she told the folks at the Brooklyn Kitchen:
I wanted to make something that was the complete opposite of what you think of when you hear the word ramen. I also wanted the dish to be simple, inviting, and something that everyone likes. To me, this is pizza.
Even though I'm usually a vegetarian cook-off competitor and cook, I used pepperoni slices, because my vision was to have the pizza look so much like a pizza that it was kind of scary— like the ramen was wearing a pizza costume for Halloween. In the spirit of bad ramen, I made it a point to incorporate the (also nonvegetarian) spice packet.
I baked the pizza in a 10 1/4-inch springform pan (which I may very well have purchased at the Brooklyn Kitchen), and it worked perfectly.
I thought I had blogged about this crazy phenomenon already, but a search through the Slice archives brought up bupkes on it. The thing at right is a slice of pizza topped with mac and cheese. It's sold—where else?—in the Dairy State, Wisconsin, Madison, to be exact. At a joint called Ian's Pizza.
The University of Wisconsin's Daily Cardinal gives some insight into the founder Ian Gurfield's motives: "Gurfield, a graduate from the University of Massachusetts, opened his first Ian’s location on Frances Street in 2001—when he was only 21 years old. He said his hope was to find a college town that had a late night scene, admitting his 'target market is drunk college students.'"
That sounds about right. I bet this thing would taste pretty damn good about three sheets in. [via YumSugars]
IAN'S PIZZA
319 North Frances Street, Madison WI 53703 (map); 608-257-0597
115 State Street, Madison WI (map); 608-442-3535 ianspizza.com
Posted by Adam Kuban, December 11, 2007 at 4:45 PM
Subject: Thanks for the inspiration
After viewing the image on your site a while back of the McDonald's pizza, I forwarded it to my boyfriend for what I thought would be a laugh. He described it as the most amazing thing ever and requested it for his birthday. We did our best to recreate.
A reader emailed with this link: "I challenge you to make this pizza and not say it's the spiciest pizza you've ever had." The video's a bit long, but if you've been looking to make a kimchi-topped pizza—and, seriously, who hasn't?—this is your how-to.
Posted by Slice Dude, October 31, 2007 at 11:45 AM
Remember I said I would scare the living s&*! out of you? Here goes....
You may have seen this around the web last week. McDonald's food as pizza toppings. [shudders] For some reason, Adam didn't get around to blogging about it....
Oh. He just managed to slip out of his gag (I have him tied to a chair in the corner of the room while I hijack Slice), and he says that the images below made him sick to look at. They kinda make me sick, too. See, you've gotta remember that I'm a slice of pizza, so this kind of molestation cuts closer to the bone for me than it does for you. Here's more gruesome detail if you want it.
Slice Dude sez: "The human who created and ate this deserves the coronary he's going to get from it."
Japan, I used to love you for your inventiveness—the way you took things from other cultures, tweaked them, and improved them.
But you're slippin', babe. That Double Roll pizza you came up with? So kinō.
Say annyong to two amazingly ostentatious pizzas that Pizza Hut South Korea has come up with (I don't know their names, so I'm just making them up here as I go along).
SCREEN NAME REDACTED: prepare to have your mind blown: hot-dog stuffed crust pizza - http://yumsugar.com/407464 nycslice: seen it: http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2007/05/pizza_link_roundup.html nycslice: ;) nycslice: and, yes, my mind was thoroughly blown nycslice: i kinda want it nycslice: i wish we had real pizza huts in nyc nycslice: instead of the pizza hut express locations SCREEN NAME REDACTED: so do i - i love that it's half and half nycslice: (um, i can't believe i typed that)
Until now, the most creative makeovers of the humble meat pie have involved stacking things on top of it. This week Domino's stacked it on something else.
The Meat Pie Pizza comes with beef mince, onions, and peas topped with thick pastry and tomato sauce—and it looks about as pretty as a half-gobbled dog's eye.
Denver area pizza lovers have a 'hole' lot [Groan —Ed.] to be excited about as Einstein Bros. Bagels cooks up new pizza bagels for its hometown customers.... Einstein Bros. is now offering five Pizza Bagel flavors in 28 Front Range restaurants.
When I was a kid, Sis Slice (who was around 7 at the time) came up with this idea—using Lender's frozen bagels, some Chef Boyardee pizza sauce, and whatever mozzarella we had on hand. She submitted the idea to a local TV station's "create an afterschool snack" contest.
And never heard from the station.
Hey, I thought it was a great idea at the time. These days, you couldn't get me near a hybrid pizza bagel. It just takes the best of two respected traditions and ruins them.
The folks at Grub Street, New York magazine's foodblog, try a mighty expensive pizza: "Made of crème fraîche, six kinds of caviar (including a sac-load of intense black Russian Royal Sevruga, the same kind used in Norma’s omelette), and shaved slices of fresh lobster, the sample sowed confusion in our proletarian ranks."
Eh. You'd be an idiot to order one of these things. It's a waste of good pizza and good caviar. But, apparently, Bo Dietl purchased one. There's one born every minute.
If you feel like being a sucker, the pizza is available at Nino's Bellissima Pizza, 890 Second Avenue, New York NY 10017 (at 47th Street); 212-355-5540.
Unfortunately, the pizza itself actually sucked. The marshmallows had a weird effect on the taste of the cheese. It was how I imagine miracle fruit might work, except instead of making sour food taste like sweet food, it made cheese taste like moldy old gym sock. I couldn't taste the marshmallow at all, just rotten cheese. And I know the cheese itself wasn't bad, because I had the other half of the pizza, the part without marshmallows. The cheese tasted fine on that part.
Deep-Fried Pizza at
THE ATLANTIC CHIPSHOP Address: 129 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn NY 11201 [map] Phone: 718-855-7775 Cost: $3 a slice The Skinny: Inspired by the Scots, who have a penchant for deep-frying just about anything, the battered slices at the Atlantic ChipShop taste like a combination of a pizza roll and a mozzarella stick. Very good, if you're into those things.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but video is priceless, especially when it comes to the wonder of deep-fried pizza. Take a peek:
Posted by Adam Kuban, December 14, 2005 at 10:56 PM
From the New York Times earlier today:
Empanadas are many things to many people. They are a savory-sweet knife-and-fork food in Bolivia and a corn-flour-crusted snack in Venezuela. In Chile, empanadas are often stuffed with seafood, which would be an unlikely filling at an empanaderia in Argentina, the country most Americans associate them with.
At Empanada Mama, a tender young shoot in the thicket of restaurants on Ninth Avenue in the 40's and 50's, they are something else still: empty canvases, ready to be rendered in a thousand new and fanciful ways. ...
There is a mozzarella and tomato sauce empanada called the pizza ($2.25) ...
What makes it Argentinean is the addition of "faina," a crisp top crust made of harina de garbanzos (chickpea flour). The faina is slow-baked separately and placed on top of the pizza before putting the whole thing in the oven again. The resulting slice ($3.70) is a kind of wedge-shaped sandwich with a distinctive crunchy top and a flavorful, melted ooze in the middle."
Doesn't sound too bad. I wonder if faina is anything like panelle, the chickpea-flour fritters found in such places as Ferdinando's Focacceria in Red Hook or Joe's of Avenue U.
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Ever had a Bagel Bite? S&*t's scary in and of itself, right?
