Pizza, that is.

Please don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Chicago deep dish pizza.  In Chicago it’s comfort food.  My advice is to skip Uno’s and Gino’s and head straight for Lou Malnati’s, specifically their sausage pizza. If you aren’t familiar with Malnati’s or the like, click here and you will turn into a Chicago deep dish devotee.  If it’s this wonderfully oooy, gooy indulgence you want there is no other place to get it besides Chicago.

Other places may try but ‘Chicago Style pizza’ is NOT in any way, shape, or form Chicago’s deep dish pizza.  This is one ‘pie’ that just can’t be duplicated outside a 25 mile radius of Wrigley Field.

How about regular old thin crust, you ask?  Well it would just be better if we didn’t talk anymore.

Not to worry, there is another kind of pizza I’m pretty fond of.  Brick-oven pizza.  It has this smokey, bubbly, slightly charred crispy crust and fresh, flavorful ingredients that are so light and so different from deep dish.  There are two places here where I can get a tasty brick-oven pizza.  One is Tony Sacco’s, a chain which I first saw in the northern suburbs of Chicago so I was very happy when one opened here.  The second is new and a food truck of sorts (more of a tent, really, next to a large beautiful brick oven) called Detroit Frankie’s Wood Fired Brick Oven.

It’s quick, inexpensive (you can get a 1/4 pizza & a water for five bucks!) and oh so good!  Light and crispy with ingredients whose flavors come through and marry the cheese, tomatoes and smokey crust.  The location is a bit out of my way but it’s completely worth it to head over for a slice.  Although rumor has it they are coming to the East Lansing Farmer’s Market this summer, which is a Sunday staple in my book – and finally something there my kid will eat!

An added plus of Detroit Frankie’s fantastic wood-fired oven is the aroma.  It’s wonderful.  It’s almost as if you were sitting around a campfire roasting a delicious pizza pie with your friends. A thought that is quite welcome after our long winter.  This is one pizza to seek out and you don’t have to leave town to get it.

P.S. I totally got to peek inside the oven!!