This Chicago Restaurant Has The Only Deep Dish Pizza Anthony Bourdain Enjoyed

Throughout his travels, the late Anthony Bourdain never missed an opportunity to push his culinary boundaries with an exotic local specialty. On a trip to Vietnam for his Food Network show, "A Cook's Tour," Bourdain consumed a cobra's still-beating heart without batting an eyelid. While hanging with the Inuit in Quebec for his Travel Channel show, "No Reservations," he ate a seal's eyeball raw, which he dubbed "not bad." It's almost as if Bourdain was in competition with himself from the time he scarfed his first oyster fresh out of the ocean in France  — an experience he wrote about in his bestselling memoir, "Kitchen Confidential." You could say the world was quite literally his oyster.

That's what makes it so surprising when you learn of Bourdain's disdain for comparatively less exotic food like Chicago's deep-dish pizza. On an episode of "No Reservations" in 2009, he explained that "Chicago is famous for many things. Not all of them are worth celebrating. I've always felt that the so-called 'deep-dish pizza' was a crime against food. It wasn't pizza at all, I believed. Instead, some kind of Midwestern mutation of a pizza."

A pizzeria called Burt's Place changed Bourdain's mind. We've already covered how to spend a day in Chicago, according to Bourdain. However, on his whirlwind tour of Chicago for "The Layover," there wasn't much room for pizza. Maybe that's because his life as a reluctant Chicago deep-dish eater had already peaked with his visit to Burt's Place.

On "No Reservations," Bourdain admitted, "I'm a New Yorker with a deep cultural aversion to pizza that is not New York pizza." This would explain why he initially took a stance against Chicago's deep-dish pizza, calling it an "abomination" and likening it to "lasagna in a crust." Pizzeria Uno is credited with inventing the style in 1943, and it still sells pies with the chunky tomato sauce and biscuit-like crust you might associate with Chicago. However, it took the caramelized crust and market-fresh ingredients used by Burt's Place to make a believer out of Bourdain. The restaurant's website still displays the Bourdain quote: "Burt's was the only deep dish pizza I ever loved."

Sitting in the booth at Burt's on "No Reservations," Bourdain and his dining companion, current Chicago Tribune food critic Louisa Chu, further compared the loaded deep dish to a casserole or pot pie. That booth now has a plaque reading, "Anthony Bourdain sat here," over it, along with a colorful Bourdain portrait. In the next booth over, you'll see a framed newspaper page from 2011, when the Tribune profiled Burt Katz, the "kinda cranky pizza guy" behind Burt's Place. At the time, Burt was a white-bearded 74-year-old who had not shaved in the four decades since he quit his corporate job to become one of Chicago's most celebrated pizzamakers. His pizza — made by appointment only for dine-in customers who called ahead — was not quite deep dish, but "pizza in the pan."

Anthony Bourdain — who would usually eschew deep dish for a ketchup-free Chicago hot dog — called the pan pizza at Burt's Place "a delightfully delicious artisanal product." Burt himself died in 2016, but not before he handed down his recipe and trained the restaurant's present owner, Jerry Petrow, to carry on his legacy. 

Explaining to the Chicago Tribune why that specific recipe works, Burt said, "It's not too much of any one thing. It's not too much cheese or spice. Overwhelm it with any one ingredient, you kill the whole meal. Life is balance. So this is balanced. You concentrate on overall taste. The crust is not a platform for the ingredients. To taste my pizza, you have to eat the crust of my pizza. Eat the whole damn thing, please! Otherwise don't eat it."

Like Bourdain, Burt was a traveler; he and his wife, Sharon, once sailed by tramp freighter from San Francisco to Japan, journeying across parts of Asia and Europe before returning to Chicago a year later. Reading the restauranteur's Tribune profile, one gets the sense that he and Bourdain were probably kindred spirits in other ways, too. Novels are a unique resource Bourdain recommended travelers use instead of guidebooks, and before opening Burt's Place, every one of Burt's restaurants had a name that was a literary allusion. There was The Inferno (as in Dante's), Gulliver's (as in "Gulliver's Travels"), and Pequod's (a more indirect reference to the ship in "Moby Dick").

Though they're under different ownership now (much like Burt's Place), both Gullivers and Pequod's remain open in the Chicago metropolitan area. If you form a more favorable opinion of the city's deep-dish pizza than Anthony Bourdain, you can also taste-test it at two other restaurants Burt Katz founded. Alas, the original Gullivers, with its "Pizza in the Pan" sign on Howard Street in Chicago, closed in 2022. However, 18 miles outside the city proper, in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, you'll find a second Gullivers location where "world-famous Chicago style deep dish" is still on the menu.

As it continues the caramelized-crust tradition, with mozzarella cheese baked into the rim, Pequod's has made a name for itself even without Bourdain's endorsement. In 2022, USA Today named it Chicago's best pizza. In 2023, it appeared on the Emmy-winning FX show, "The Bear." In 2024, it was #1 on the Yelp list of America's top 100 pizza spots.

There are two Pequod's locations: one on Clybourn Avenue in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, and another one 17 miles from downtown in Morton Grove (near Burt's Place). The former sometimes boasts a two-hour wait, but it also delivers to hotels within a two-mile radius. The latter is the one Burt founded after quitting his job back in 1971 and is actually closer to O'Hare International Airport. If you do opt for pick-up, they even have a pizza valet who will come out to the car with your order.