Chicago Still Disappoints

I got suckered in again.

We were at the grocery, and I saw something I had never seen before: frozen Pizzeria Uno Chicago-style cheese pizza. Like a fool who never learns, having tried Lou Malnati’s acceptable frozen pizza and my own unimpressive homemade jobs, I bought one.

It’s not good.

The crust is hard pie crust with a tiny bit of air in it, and it’s not good pie crust. The shortening tastes old. The cheese is on the grainy side. The sauce is okay, but it can’t save everything else.

I just realized what the crust is like. You know those stale flat noodles they serve in bad Chinese restaurants as snacks? Imagine one of those big enough to put a pizza in.

The Malnati’s cheese pie I bought was pretty good. The shortening tasted less old, and the cheese was fine. But a decent Pizza Hut pan pizza is better. The sausage pie I tried was not good at all because the sausage sat under the sauce and got boiled.

As things stand now, I have to stand by my previous conclusion, which is that Chicago-style can be “worth making.” But let’s be honest. You could say that about oatmeal.

A good Sicilian is the best food possible. This is according to my rankings, which are, of course, correct. Top food on Earth: my own Sicilian. Number two: a good thin pizza. The style is not that important. It just has to be good. After that, prime rib. After that, my own cheesecake.

I think Chicago-style should probably be put in a second-rate pizza category along with frozen pizza, although I’m not sure Chicago-style can be as good as the best frozen pies. I do enjoy those Stouffer’s French bread pizzas.

Chicagoans themselves are not big fans of Chicago-style. They prefer the other Chicago-style, which is thin tavern pizza. How good can their deep dish be if the people who can get it whenever they want usually order something else?

My two Chicago-area-raised cousins love Malnati’s, but they seem to be out of sync with other people up there. I should try making Chicago tavern-style.

I threw out one slice of the Uno pie. I ate three because I was hungry. Very sad. Potential wasted for no good reason.

Why do people who cook for a living make bad food? That’s a perplexing question. If the food has to be cheap, or it has to have a 10-year shelf life, or it has some other weird condition to meet, like being vegan, sure, it may be impossible to make it taste good. But most food isn’t like that.

Let’s talk about kung pao chicken and fried pork dumplings. It costs the same amount of money to make bad Chinese food as good Chinese food, so why not do it right? Same amount of work. If you have a Chinese restaurant, and you’re Chinese, you can’t lie and pretend you can’t tell your food is bad. You should fix it. It’s 2024, and excellent recipes and videos are available to anyone. Why make bad food, then?

Still, most Chinese restaurants are very bad. No wonder the children of Chinese restaurateurs become plastic surgeons and cardiologists. They can’t take the shame.

The people who make this Uno mess know it’s no good. They’ve surely tried it. Surely no one would invest in a big business without trying the product.

I suppose that’s wrong. Maybe they haven’t tried it. Maybe some guy who runs a company that makes garbage frozen food for other businesses told them everything would be fine, and they believed it.

The web says Uno went public and was then taken private again, so now it’s owned by people who probably know nothing about pizza. That would explain a lot. I was thinking it might belong to heirs to were too busy doing coke and wrecking speedboats to watch the business.

Myron Mixon is supposed to be the world’s greatest BBQ pitmaster, but when he opened a restaurant in Miami, it served hog slop and closed with 3 Google stars. This, after he talked all sorts of smack about showing everyone what real BBQ was like. Humiliating. He blamed the people who actually owned and ran the restaurant. He claimed they wouldn’t meet standards. A name isn’t enough to make food taste good.

He shouldn’t have talked smack if he wasn’t going to be on the premises to maintain standards. Ridiculous error for a chef. Every cook knows that as soon as the guy who knows what he’s doing leaves the kitchen to use the can, everything goes crazy. A kitchen is lucky if it has one person who can actually make it work. The rest are all hourly NPC’s.

Uno frozen pizza is nasty, so if you try it after reading this, you have only yourself to blame.