How TV's Food Guy Became Pizza Fest Man
Learn more about Steve Dolinsky's food journey and his big event this month
Raised on Bland Food, Jazzed About Chicago Pizza
I’ve known Steve Dolinsky for quite a while. For several years when FamilyFarmed was doing its Good Food Expo, the organization was invited to discuss the event on The Feed podcast featuring Steve and Chef Rick Bayless, so I got to hang out in Rick’s test kitchen/studio. Of course, I also have seen Steve many times in his role as a TV food journalist, now as “The Food Guy” on NBC5 Chicago and previously as “The Hungry Hound “ on ABC7 Chicago.
We were well enough acquainted to say hi when our paths crossed, but I had never interview him before we got together recently to discuss how his food journey had led him from a bland diet while growing up in St. Cloud, Minnesota to his status as the leading expert on Chicago’s pizza universe.
You have the opportunity to share in Steve’s pizza wisdom by attending Pizza City Fest, the two-day event that he is producing with his wife Amy Dordek Dolinsky. It takes place Aug. 26-27 (Saturday and Sunday) at The Salt Shed (the former Morton Salt building) at 1357 N. Elston Ave. in the West Town neighborhood.
A total of 40 pizza makers, representing all 10 styles of pizza that Steve has identified as prominent in Chicago. There were be 20 different pizza makers on each day, and sides, salads, desserts and beverages are included in the ticket price.
And if you want to be a pizza wizard yourself, I recommend Steve’s books, Pizza City USA: 101 Reasons Why Chicago is America’s Best Pizza Town (2018) and The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide: A History of Squares & Sides in the Windy City (2021), both published by Northwestern University Press. You can also take one of his Pizza City USA Tours.
By the way, if you want a quick primer on Chicago’s 10 pizza styles based on Steve’s books, check out this July 19 article in Local Food Forum.
I hope you enjoy the following excerpts from my chat with Steve. And click the button below to learn more about Pizza City Fest and buy tickets.
Q: According to your bio, you grew up in a Kosher household where meals were more perfunctory than flavorful. What spurred your zeal for good food?
A: My brother's wife is from Australia and she was really into food way before there was a term called foodie, just a passionate cook and eater and traveler. I met her when I was probably in sixth or seventh grade. My brother was nine years older than I was. I would go to their apartment and they would be cooking and talking about restaurants and food.
I never had that experience at home because food was just really a necessity, it wasn't really about pleasure. It was about filling up. It was very starchy and kind of monochromatic. It was just really 1970s-era kind of depressing, things out of cans and frozen foods. So [my sister in law] really kind of opened my eyes to all this other potential that was out there in the world, and she had given me a set of cookbooks called the Australian Women's Home Weekly series of cookbooks. They were they were almost like a thick food magazine and soft cover...
My first job out of college was in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I remember looking at these cookbooks and going to the store and looking for fresh herbs to make Thai food or something. And they just looked at me like I was crazy, because it was 1990-91.
Q: I grew up in New York with New York-style pizza. There wasn’t a lot of that in St. Cloud, I imagine.
A: We had like two pizza places. I mean, the pizza that I grew up eating was probably Shakey’s, a national chain... That awakening came when I got to Chicago, and then as I became a food reporter and doing more traveling, and then going to New York actually seeing what the New York-style pizza was all about.
The thing that triggered it was actually a listicle that I read in Chicago, something like the seven hottest pizza places. And I thought to myself, I've been to most of those places. None of them are that interesting. Is it really the best pizza place? How much legwork has been done? So I just decided then and there that I was going to try to tackle it and get to the bottom of it...
Part of the blessing and the curse of social media is people would chime in and say, if you're going to do #Chicagopizzacrawl you better go to Pudgie’s, Phil's, what have you. And so I started going to all those places, because if I don't go, I'm going to be criticized for not knowing. And then I better understand New York pizza as well as anybody from New York, just so I can have the conversation to compare the cities... I went to about 60 places to get that research. It's important to have street credibility. These are the best pizza places?... I've actually been to places, and I have a good sense of what makes a good pizza.
Q: So then you plunged into Chicago’s pizza world the same way, which led to your first book.
A: I knew I had to do 101. I pitched it as a book, initially 70 places, and I got a lot of traction and a lot of talking on my website... [The publisher said] how many can you recommend? About 70? I said I’d only recommend about 50 of these. And they said, well, we need 100 or 101 to do the book...
That was kind of my look at Chicagoland as a whole. Knowing that we have 10 styles of pizza here now, knowing that it's more than deep-dish, knowing that some of these sacred cows really don't belong in those top five or top 10 lists.
And then when the pandemic hit, it was like, “Oh my God, there's so many people pivoting to pizza. And there's so much excitement about pizza now, that warranted a second book.”
Q: How do you decide which pizza places and pizza styles you include in your books?
A: Sometimes, I'm just driving down the street and I see an interesting awning and I'll go in if it looks like an old joint. Typically, it's because somebody had referred me or I heard about it or read about it. And if they're doing New Haven [style], the new Quad Cities [style], it doesn't mean it's automatically going to be included. I'm looking for the quality of the toppings, how they place them. Is there a thought that went into this? Are they using water in the dough? What kind of oven are they baking in? I'm looking for something that's delicious and memorable.
And so if it happens to be based on a style from another part of the country, that's great. I don't think that we should just talk about stuffed and deep and tavern all this all the time in Chicago. So the second book really proved to me that we really are this great pizza city because we have so many styles. When I go to Toronto, larger city than Chicago, right? They've really got about four or five styles. Now I go to New York City, you've probably got about five styles. You know, it's slices, it’s squares, it's artisan, it's Neapolitan, and maybe a little bit of grandma [the thin Sicilian pizza]. That's about it. There's like one or two in Detroit... you don't have that much diversity. And so look at Chicago, we got a deep bench. There's a lot of diversity here in terms of pizza.
Q: Why do some people have so much hate for deep-dish pizza?
A: Well, first of all, let's clarify. Most people when they they're hating on deep-dish, they're typically referring to stuffed, and stuffed is a subcategory of deep-dish. Most people don't realize this, if you asked 10 people, eight of them probably don't know there's a difference. So that's one of the problems, and that's one of the reasons I got into this game was to educate people and talk about the difference between deep and stuffed. When someone says I don't like deep-dish, I say let's unpack that and walk me through this. Where did you go? And they'll typically tell me about a stuffed place...
So I love grandma [style pizza]. I wish we had more grandma-style in Chicago, that's really something I miss from New York. But the ripping on the deep-dish is just so lazy, uninformed. It's just ignorant. Tell me, you've been to three or four different places, and that you still hate it, and then we can have a discussion about it.
Q: Let’s talk a little bit about the Pizza City USA tours and how they came up with that idea.
A: It was really just based on that first book. I realized that there wasn't enough truthtelling and myth busting about pizza. There was only one business in Chicago doing pizza tours. I took the tour and I thought, okay, this is a good start, but I can build on this as a reporter, and really make them more about showing people different styles of pizza.
So you know, walking in a neighborhood like this in the West Loop. You've got to go to Lou Malnati’s to see Lou Malnati’s if you're not from here, right. But then maybe go to Nancy's, where they created stuffed pizza and show them the difference right off the bat. Come here to Bonci and see what Roman al taglio means, and why would they have picked Chicago as the only place outside of Italy to open up. And then to go to Forno Rosso and talk about what Neapolitan is, which is the original pizza, back in the 13th century.
So it was really to show people that we have multiple styles, we're not just a one-trick pony. And not all pizza is right on Michigan Avenue.
Q: So all these were all steps toward Pizza City Fest.
A: Yeah, the book led to the tours, which led to the podcast, which has been every other Friday for four years, which led to this festival only because I saw a video a couple of years ago on YouTube of a thing in the Bronx. There were a couple of Pizza Master ovens on Arthur Avenue and they had some pizza makers come in and make pizzas on the street. I thought, if you're going to do a festival, you have to make the pizza there...
There was an event here called like the Chicago Pizza Party that was held in the wintertime, and they would make the pizzerias bring the pizzas to the event in the winter. You know, bring them upstairs, keep under heat lamps. I just thought that was sad, it's unfair to the pizza maker. So can we do something with ovens? And it turns out that Pizza Master, which is a Swedish company, has their national distribution point here in the suburbs, in Wheeling, and they were very excited about it.
And so we decided, let's do something in Chicago down in the West Loop, in a kind of a hot area, with these ovens, baking fresh. And not only that, but each oven would be its own style. So you can do any style on these ovens because they get up to 932 Fahrenheit, so you can do a Neapolitan. But I said, Well, we've got so many styles in Chicago, why don't we have 10 ovens? 10 styles. So that oven has two pizzerias on it. That's Neapolitan, that oven has two pizzerias on their deep dish. That's Sicilian. There's Detroit, there's Roman. And so that's how we started it.
Then it led to, let's do one in Los Angeles, because LA again, everybody's in their bubble. Nobody understands that there's a regional sense of pizza there. I saw it happening. I've been reading about it, and talked to a friend of mine there who produces events... Now that's going to be every last weekend of April, 4,000 people came over two days. So we did the same thing here last July. And so now for the third one, it's going to be here at the Salt Shed, which is great venue and we're planning on more than 4,000.
Again, 10 ovens, 40 pizza makers over two days. I mean, you can only do this kind of event in a city like Chicago, we've got 40 pizza makers... We've got three from the suburbs, but we're gonna have salads and desserts, and part of it is lectures and seminars and learning.
So the sort of the Cliff Notes way I talk about the event is it's illuminating. It's educating. It’s donating. We illuminate the small independent pizzerias, we educate people about how to make a great pizza and what goes into making great pizza. And then we do a donation in the community, Slice Out Hunger and we're adding CCAP [Careers through Culinary Arts Program], which is for students who want to pursue a career in culinary. So yeah, so we're trying to do the right thing and do good in the community, but then teach people something and also shine a light on pizzerias that deserve it.
Q: So all 10 styles are represented by the 20 pizza makers each day .
Yep. And all the drinks are included. Some people are balking at $95 for general admission. But if you're including cocktails and beer and wine and soda and water all day, as much as you want, it's a good deal, because typically you pay 15 bucks a cocktail at one of those summer festivals.
So just like we did in LA, we rolled everything into one price because transactions slow down the lines, and you just feel like you're getting nickel and dimed the whole day. So this way, you don’t need to bring any money to the event, you've already paid for everything. Everything's included, all the food, 10 slices, sides, salads, desserts, classes, that donation to charity and all the drinks. So I think it's a good deal. And we made sure we negotiated with a new ticket company, so there's not an exorbitant ticket fee. We're gonna live music too, because it’s Salt Shed.