He’d heard of breweries that used beer or spent grain to ferment their pizza dough once he started playing around, he decided he liked what the carbonation did to the texture. Wilde experimented for nearly a year with different combinations of crust, cheese, and sauce. “Not Chicago-style, not New York-style, not New Haven. “I wanted to do something different,” he says. He finally agreed to take on the job, after what he describes as much hemming and hawing, on the condition that he would have the freedom to make his own kind of pizza. He considered it “a pedestrian concept,” like burgers or hot dogs. Johnson felt it made financial sense to replace it with another pizza restaurant.Īt first Wilde was reluctant. Through contacts in the city’s food community, he met Jeremiah Johnson, an architect and restaurant designer who had just lost a tenant in a building he owned on 21st Street in Pilsen, a branch of Gino’s East that hadn’t had much success in the neighborhood. He’d trained in fine dining in the Twin Cities where he grew, though his first job in Chicago was at Joy District, the multistory bar and nightclub in River North. Wilde never intended to become a pizza chef. If Bob’s had opened in, say, Bronzeville or Sauganash, it would have been Bronzeville- or Sauganash-style pizza instead. Nothing about it is particularly characteristic of Pilsen, formerly an enclave of Czech immigrants and now thoroughly and proudly Mexican. There is a single modest layer of cheese, a custom blend of Swiss, Parmesan, and mozzarella. Its crust is somewhere between New York and Neapolitan, crisp on the outside and airy in the middle and fortified by a cold ferment period of three or four days, aided by Old Style beer. The secret ingredient in the Bob’s Pizza crust is Old Style (and also a proprietary spice blend).Ī Pilsen-style pizza has triangular slices.
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