Tavern-style pizza

Tavern-style pizza, also known as party-cut pizza, is a type of pizza that has both a thin crust firm enough to have a noticeable crunch and slices cut into squares, as opposed to wedges.

Characteristics Although regional styles can vary, tavern-style pizzas across the Midwestern United States typically have a crispy and thin crust. In Milwaukee, this is referred to as a "cracker" crust; crusts on Minnesota-style pizza tend to be a bit softer. Unlike hand-tossed pizzas common on the east coast of the United States or in Italy, the dough is rolled out before baking.

Prior to cooking, the crust is topped with a seasoned tomato sauce, cheese, and toppings like sausage. Immediately prior to service, the pizzas are cut into squares instead of the classic triangle.

History Purpose

The name "tavern-style" comes from how the pizzas were originally served in taverns. According to at least one origin story, the pizza tempted customers into lingering at the establishment, at which point they would be more likely to order more alcohol. Other bars might serve peanuts or other salty snacks for the same purpose.

According to one narrative, the pizza's signature square slices were created so that a customer could hold that in one hand and a beer in the other. Another theory is that they made it possible for taverns without plates to instead set the pizza on napkins.

Creation Claims to originating the style have come from residents of Milwaukee and of Chicago.

Milwaukee Milwaukee's claim dates to a restaurant named Caradaro Club, which opened in 1945. It was the first establishment in the city to serve pizza. The classic story is that Caradaro's co-owner Joe Todaro and his wife Agatha married Neapolitan pizza's thin crust with Sicilian pizza's rectangle slices. They were influenced by Anthony Paterno, who sold Italian foods in Milwaukee and Chicago and baked pizza in the latter. He allowed Joe to look at his operations but would not give them a dough recipe. As a result, Todaro's wife innovated Caradaro's especially thin and crispy crust, which by 2026 measured about thick. Caradaro then popularized their pizza by handing out free individual square slices to people walking by the restaurant.

Of those pizzas, Todaro's son later recalled:

Chicago Restaurants in Chicago may have begun serving something like tavern-style pizza beginning in the 1930s. At the least, people were consuming thin- or thinner-crust pizzas from places like Granato's Pizzeria Napolitana. However, Chicago reporter Monica Eng found that a contemporary Chicago Tribune article described Granato's pizza as having an English muffin-like crust, which she believed would be a much "spongier texture" than the later tavern style.

Today, a number of individual Chicago restaurants have claims to originating the style between 1946 and 1950. Eng hypothesized that the first tavern-style pizza in Chicago was baked in 1946 by the-then Vito's Tavern, later renamed to Vito and Nick's Pizzeria. Rose George, the owner of the restaurant as of 2023, has stated that her father got the idea during his military service in Italy during World War II. He wrote home to his mother and asked if she could create a thin crust for what would become the restaurant's pizza.

Another contender for the first tavern-style pizza in Chicago is the Home Run Inn in South Lawndale, which opened in 1947. Eng identified at least four additional restaurants that could have originated the style: Italian Fiesta in Hyde Park, Father and Son in Logan Square, Marie's Pizza and Liquor in Albany Park, and Candlelite in Rogers Park.

In 2026, Block Club Chicago reported that many Chicagoans objected to the term "tavern-style", preferring instead to refer to the style simply as "thin-crust" to distinguish it from the city's deep-dish pizza style. Bill Savage, a professor at Northwestern University, described the name tavern-style as a retronym.

Elsewhere Many other tavern-style pizza establishments also opened in the US Midwest in the 1940s. Notable examples include:

Wells Brothers in Racine, Wisconsin, which started using a thin crust pizza with cornmeal on the bottom in that decade Riverside Pizza in Iron River, Michigan, established in 1946 and known for making pizzas with a "sweet and tangy" sauce; they have been voted as the best pizzas in the state's Upper Peninsula

Regional varieties

Chicago hosts the iconic variety of tavern-style pizza, but several regional varieties exist, all of which retain the thin crust:

St. Louis-style pizza is cut into squares, made with Provel cheese, somewhat sweet tomato sauce, and an especially crispy crust. Minnesota-style pizza is cut into squares, with hearty toppings, a generous amount of cheese, and somewhat spicy tomato sauce; the crusts can also be a bit softer Columbus-style pizza has as many toppings as can fit on the pizza. Milwaukee-style pizza shares most of its characteristics with Chicago, but it has a thinner cracker-like crust, may be oval-shaped, and may use Wisconsin's brick cheese. Its classic toppings are sausage, onion, and mushrooms.

Lesser-cited varieties include Dayton, Ohio, which uses unsweetened tomato sauce.

Sales Tavern-style pizza is commonly found in restaurants across much of the Midwestern United States. Its popularity widened across the United States in the 2020s. The expansion included tavern-style releases from the US restaurant chains Pizza Hut and Domino's, in addition to the Tombstone frozen pizza brand.

A number of sources have said that tavern-style pizza outsells deep-dish pizza in Chicago. According to 2013 Grubhub data and the company Chicago Pizza Tours, thin-crust pizza outsells the more widely known deep-dish style among locals, with GrubHub stating that deep-dish comprises only 9% of its pizza deliveries. In response, Technomics food industry researcher Darren Tristano questioned GrubHub's conclusion on the basis of the delivery service's user demographics, saying that its younger users cannot afford deep-dish pizza, while NPR noted that the data would not include information on two particular chains specializing in the style (though with just 20 restaurants in the city of 2.7million) that are not on GrubHub. In 2020 COVID-affected data, Yelp also found that thin-crust pizza was more popular in Chicago. However, Food & Wine magazine spoke to multiple Chicago pizzerias in 2024 whose sales of the two styles of pizza were evenly split.

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References

Tavern-style pizza

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