Pizza Hut’s Tavern Style Pizza; Is It Genuine Chicago?

When I first saw the ad for Pizza Hut's Chicago Tavern-style pizza, I was intrigued and a little skeptical. For those unfamiliar, tavern-style pizza is the pizza many of us from Chicago grew up eating. Chicago-style stuffed pizza was for special occasions or an occasional treat. Still, the pizza that would wind up on the dining room table once a week would be a thin-crust pizza cut into little squares, usually picked up from a neighborhood joint. So, how does Pizza Hut's Tavern-style pizza compare? Is it genuine Chicago?

Truthfully, I'm not sure fifteen / twenty years ago anyone thought that much about what's become known as tavern-style pizza. It was all about New York's foldable thin-crust gigantic pizza slices or the super filling Chicago-style deep-dish/stuffed variety going head to head. I didn't even think that, truthfully, many Chicagoans realized that thin-crust pizza on the table every week was somewhat unique.

I started thinking about it after one of the guys I managed a radio station with mentioned that the "real" Chicago-style pizza was the thin-crust or tavern-crust pizza that wound up on the kitchen table once a week. It made sense because that was the pizza we always had in my childhood. It's what we got at the pizza places we went to, it's what was served at friends' birthday parties, it's what we got when we served pizza at the occasional family party.

From there, over the last fifteen or twenty years, slowly but surely, the discussion about tavern-style pizza and what places in Chicago are the best at making it have crept more and more into the debate.

So here we are, with Pizza Hut, the first national chain, to my knowledge, to embrace Chicago's tavern-style pizza as a gimmick to try and sell more pies. Yet, how close is it to an authentic Chicago-style tavern pizza? And, is it genuine Chicago?

I've had Pizza Hut's Chicago Tavern-style pizza three times, once from the Warrensburg Pizza Hut and twice from the Pizza Hut in Sedalia. The first time we ordered, we got a half-supreme, half-pepperoni pizza from the Warrensburg store. The crust was the biggest thing that seemed "wrong" with this pizza.

Many descriptions of Chicago tavern-style pizzas say the crust should be thin and crispy. Yes, the crust should be thin and hold the toppings without falling apart or feeling wimpy, but in most tavern-style pizzas I've enjoyed, the crust is soft enough to fold over, and the crispiest part of the crust is on the outside slices of the pizza.

Maybe it was that we got half-supreme, which isn't one of Pizza Hut's suggested options for their Chicago tavern-style pizza, so that may have changed how long it spent baking or something that messed with how crispy the crust should be.

That said, when I ordered from the Sedalia Pizza Hut, I tried the Double Pepperoni Tavern Pizza and another time, I just got a tavern-style Pepperoni Pizza. The crusts on both pizzas more accurately reflected the crusts on Chicago tavern-style pizzas that I enjoyed over the years: thin enough to be Chicago, thick enough to hold the toppings, and soft enough (especially the interior pizza slices) to fold.

I thought the amount of sauce and taste of the sauce on the pizza was good, and the cheese was OK. It does seem like a little more cheese on top of the pie would be good. I avoided getting sausage because no national pizza chain does sausage the way Chicago pizza places do, and that would be a letdown, so I skipped it.

Is it genuine Chicago? No, it is not. First, the sausage is not like what most Chicago pizza places would use. Second, most Chicago pizza places seem slightly more generous with the cheese. Third, and this may be snarky, in Chicago, whether you call it tavern-style or thin-crust, this is generally the thin-crust pizza served in Chicago. It's food, not a marketing gimmick to sell more pizzas.

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That said, Pizza Hut's Chicago Tavern-style Pizza does a decent enough job of satisfying those Chicago tavern-style pizza cravings to be in the running for our pizza order anytime Pizza Hut chooses to have it on the menu. As long as I'm not in Chicago, I want to be clear about that.

I have another recommendation for those curious about Chicago's tavern-style pizza but not into Pizza Hut: Fitter's Pub in Warrensburg. They do an excellent tavern-style pizza and seem to do it well consistently. They come closer to replicating Chicago's tavern-style pizzas than Pizza Hut. It's worth a try.