Pizza Hut Is Slinging Chicago Tavern-Style Pies. We Sent A Thin-Crust Pro To Try It (2024)

John Carruthers is the founder of Crust Fund Pizza, where he makes and sells pizzas to raise money for community organizations.

CHICAGO — Tavern-style pizza (or square-cut, or tavern-cut, or just pizza if you grew up in Chicagoland) is at long last having its big national moment.

The distinguished food and news publications have come by for a couple squares. Pizza oven brands are spreading recipes to amateur pizza makers across the globe. And most recently, a very large and undeniably iconic national chain has decided that it wants in.

Pizza Hut is officially in the tavern-style game, and that’s a good indicator of how far this 90-degree-cut wildfire has spread.

But is it any good? The dine-in pizza palaces of our youth being a thing of the past, we grabbed takeout and headed to the park that a guy tried to make his yard with hedges back in early COVID times.

A Word Before We Eat

The prevailing municipal sentiment, at least among the pizza nerds in my circle, is to want to dunk on this — partly because Pizza Hut is a chain and partly because Chicagoans are uniquely great at demanding national attention and then, when they get it, immediately wanting to tell outsiders they aren’t doing it the right way.

That’s not the way we were rolling in.

It’s a universal good if cheap, widely available tavern-style pizza turns more folks on to the style and stems the tide of deep dish jokes at family Thanksgivings nationwide. I’m also incredibly fond of Pizza Hut from growing up in the ’90s. It was an era of arcade games, X-Men tie-ins, and ice-cold pop in tall red plastic cups luminous with condensation. Not just a dish or a restaurant, but a vibe. I read hundreds of pages of whatever was around just to amass the Book-It stickers necessary to get my own personal pan pizza. The setup these days is “grab it and get the hell out,” but that doesn’t wipe clean the slate of memories. If anything, it throws them into sharper relief.

So with clear eyes and full hearts, and other quotes from “Friday Night Lights,” it was time to order. We nixed the Pesto Margherita as a California Pizza Kitchen try-hard option and the Double Pepperoni as antithetical to the only city where the preferred topping is sausage. So to judge the Hut’s foray into our beloved and misunderstood municipal style, here’s what we ordered:

• Cheese (cheese, Hut dust)
• Spicy Chicken Sausage (spicy marinara, chicken sausage, fire roasted peppers, caramelized onions)
• Ultimate (sweet marinara, Italian sausage, classic pepperoni, fire roasted peppers, caramelized onions, grape tomatoes)
• Custom Pizza (more on that below)

Cheese

Here’s where we set the baseline for sauce, cheese, crust and the bake. A lot of folks rightly use plain cheese pizza to judge a place’s overall quality. In which case … ope!

The first sign of danger was a mere two cuts each way. On a medium pizza! For a style predicated on one-handing while getting pleasantly loaded between your blue-collar job and dinner at home, the lack of portability was not welcome. That said, the rest of the pizzas followed a less-sacrilegious 3-by-3 grid. So we’ll write that off to first-pizza jitters.

The bake on the cheese pizza was a pleasant surprise. It’s the kind of doneness you usually need to wheedle out of your neighborhood place with “well done” or “in the old oven” or whatever code word activates the cook to coax it to the 30-second place between “just a few more seconds” and “oh … oh no.”

And credit where credit is due, the crust is extremely thin — if not quite Kim’s Uncle or Pat’s thin, it’s edging up to it. It’s also docked, which many pizza makers do to ensure even curing and/or baking. But there’s no discernible flavor to the crust itself. In a city where “cracker” is a positive pizza descriptor, this is cracker [pejorative].

The bake also ended up exposing the fact that this dough just might not be up to the task. The well-done bake and good-looking undercrust also brought out toughness in the dough that we didn’t see in the three other pizzas. Near the edges, it took some ripping/tearing with the teeth. And while I love acting like a movie theater trash can possum, I missed the crisp underside and clean bite of a really well-made tavern dough.

Part of checking these pizzas out, chain fast food that they are, was to compare them to the tavern pies that we know and love. And not just for ol Pizza Frasier here, but anyone who lives in the Chicago area and loves this pizza style. The difference you’ll pick out right away is the part-skim mozzarella. Pizza Hut uses part-skim cheese on most of its pizzas, and it can’t replicate the creamy richness of the full-fat stuff. Good cheese can make even a tiny square seem deeply flavorful. Part-skim just can’t, even with the welcome addition of the mysterious and beguiling Hut Dust (a mix of grated parmesan, garlic powder, parsley and some preservatives).

I still haven’t mentioned the sauce, and that’s because it took great pains to hide like a Victorian child with strict parents. Visually, it’s under the cheese and above the crust. Spiritually, it’s hiding behind curtains in the conservatory.

Don’t despair! It gets, at the very least, more interesting from here.

Rating: 3/10

Spicy Chicken Sausage

It seems uniquely cruel to work up a Chicago menu and make the only custom sausage out of chicken. Have you ever, on a trip to a beloved dive bar that doesn’t have a kitchen, seen a working person wearily sit down, take a cold sip of that first beer, and tear open a pizza based on chicken sausage? I have not. I submit that YOU have not. But this was an intriguingly weird thing to explore.

The sausage itself is a trip. It bakes up looking like a salad crouton and tastes like even less. It’s hard to describe the sausage without instead just describing the space around it. It is the Crimestoppers sketch of sausage as told by a witness 50 feet away who was just happy the police wanted to listen to them.

The fire-roasted peppers are fine, if not great, and noticeably sweet. The caramelized onions entered witness protection years ago. But the spicy marinara works up some welcome warmth a few bites in and the pesto (pesto! At Pizza Hut! This is a wild timeline!) breathes some welcome herbaceousness into the room.

Against all odds, our pizza party improves.

Rating: 4/10

Ultimate

It is quite the thing to declare something the Ultimate Tavern-style Pizza. I don’t even do that in my own alley when I’ve had several beers and a banger of a monthly special. So this automatically got into the order.

The chicken sausage pizza experience was some interesting accouterments orbiting a dying star of a meat, so we figured the addition of pepperoni and sausage would up the salt and lift the boat.

That was the plan, anyway. Reality brings a pile of wet.

Our chicken sausage pizza showed a sadly underbaked crust, and it turns out more toppings at presumably the same bake time is bad math. The underside is noticeably pale and flabby, and almost no piece passes the “hold it from a corner and it doesn’t flop down” test. The famous HTFACAIDFD test that you’re all familiar with. The extra ingredients and richness are canceled out by an overall underdone feeling.

But, miracles abound, someone walked by our bench and asked the polite version of “why are you maniacs filming yourselves eating Pizza Hut?” He took a square we offered and reminded us that at any time, from anywhere, a slice of free pizza always means things are looking up.

It’s not the ultimate tavern-style pie, but it gets an extra point. For friendship.

Rating: 4.5/10

Attempted Giardiniera

I can’t speak for other pizzerias (Derrick Tung’s attorney made that clear in writing), but I sell more sausage and giardiniera pizza than everything else combined. I call it the Royko, and the numbers are frankly not even close. Imagine my surprise when Pizza Hut, having seemingly given everything a really committed try to this point, totally left giardiniera off the menu.

But we are a city that overcomes the insurmountable. We raise buildings from the swamp. We rebuild what cruel fate burns down. We reverse the river because it is necessary and also because it is very funny to shoot the wastewater at St. Louis. So in the absence of giardiniera, we conjure its 16-inch softball broken-pinkie essence: Italian sausage, jalapenos, roasted peppers, and banana peppers. A little heat, a little more salinity, and some sweetness to tie it all together over the guiding light of Chicago’s favorite pizza meat.

Here’s the snag — they forgot the sausage. These things happen.

That said, this was the pizza that had, by far, the most flavor in the bunch. And, not for nothing, it most resembled the kind of pizza you’d get at an established tavern-style pizzeria and be perfectly happy eating. I’d house this thing at a birthday party while avoiding a conversation with that other kid’s dad. You know the one.

Did we out-pizza the Hut? The paper plates they gave us said it was impossible, but I’ll suspect it until my final day.

Rating: 5.5/10

It Is Cool And Good That Chains Want In

They can’t all be winners. Even your favorite shop has had an off day or two if you scour the recesses of your brain. And they’re not writing recipes in Plano, Texas, and translating that down to teenagers wondering why the jean jacket man is filming in the parking lot at 11 a.m.

The point is, there’s effort on display. Pizza Hut, a brand that defines fast food pizza for a hearty chunk of us, decided putting Chicago in front of what it’s doing is the way to better sales and generate more attention. They put out a very thin, properly docked (in some cases), decently baked version of the pizza we all grew up eating. The topping choices and combinations confound more often than not, but they also didn’t grow up watching Tom Skilling and eating Italian beefs with the posture of a frozen jumbo shrimp.

But if this halting foray at tavern-style pizza, wobbling on newborn-deer legs, is what converts the unaware toward the greatest pizza style in the world then we’ll welcome those folks with open arms.

The important part is that, mistakes aside, the Hut’s heart is seemingly in the right place — like an alderperson who OKs funding for a beautiful new park a couple weeks before they go down for tax fraud. Their enthusiasm is laudable.

Doesn’t mean you necessarily have to eat it, though. Support your local shop.

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