Wilde made sure he was at Bob’s every day and made a point of serving the customers personally, which wasn’t hard because the restaurant has only six tables. Wilde’s business partner Johnson, who had lived in the neighborhood for 20 years, advised him to take care of the customers and let the pizza speak for itself. Pilsen has plenty of taquerias and tamale carts, they told Wilde what they wanted was pepperoni and sausage. and longtime residents are wary of outsiders, particularly those who claim to serve “Pilsen-style pizza.” Neighbors told Wilde that the Gino’s had failed because ownership had made ham-handed efforts to pander to what it considered local tastes: chorizo and poblanos. Pilsen has been slowly gentrifying over the past decade - several upscale non-Mexican restaurants have opened on the main 18th Street strip in recent years, including HaiSous and S.K.Y. “It was like, what did I just do? It was really good.”īob’s opened quietly in March 2019 with little advertising beyond a sign. When it came out of the oven, it got a garnish of fresh dill. “I like pickles,” he says, “so I started playing around.” His first attempt was a base of garlic cream, followed by a layer of mortadella, a light dusting of cheese, and finally the pickles, laid out like slices of pepperoni.
Through Google, he learned that pickle pizza was a thing in New York. Wilde wanted something that was unavailable anywhere else in Chicago - a tall order in a city with such a large and varied pizza scene. His signature pie, the pickle pizza, however, came quickly. Many of the ingredients, like the sausage, come from Chicago purveyors. As a final touch, each pizza would receive a sprinkle of sea salt, cracked pepper, and fresh herbs as it came out of the oven. He tried many different beers, but finally settled on Old Style not because it was cheap, but because he wanted an American lager with a “beer” flavor, not the hoppy and more nuanced notes of craft beer. 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.