Yum, All organic ingredients.
Light and fresh 8 inch pizza, made to order
Monday through Friday from 10:05am - 1:55pm
Origins of Kick Butt Gourmet Pizza:
I remember this one day as a college student attending a university just outside Chicago, it was early evening and I walked by this empty Pizza Hut with this sincerely heavy hearted feeling. The thought entered my mind of someone mistakenly eating there rather than any of the regular corner pizzerias. I have traveled around the country I found that most people are familiar with the more famous Chicago style deep dish pizza. In Chicago everyone appreciates a good Chicago deep dish pizza, but most of the time when we order pizza, we order a regular pizza from the local pizzeria which would be considered more of a thin crust pizza than a deep dish.
Now a typical local pizzeria is usually located on the corner of any Chicago city block and sometimes one will find an extra one in the middle of the block just to be certain the pizza demand is covered. These are small places called "Vito's", "Tony's", or " Stephano's " and they generally provide carry out and delivery only. Sometimes there might be a few tables inside covered with red and white checkered linens with a few local families dining in but most of the business is carry out and delivery.
When one orders a pizza, it's just called a pizza and one picks the ingredients that go on it. These are not the kind of places one orders the "signature" Mango Tandoori Chicken pizza. In fact you can't get chicken on your pizza. If you ask for chicken they'll kindly tell you to go to the chicken and rib joint next door. For meat you get sausage or pepperoni and maybe you could ask for beef sausage instead of the regular Italian sausage but why?
30 to 40 minutes after one orders a "pizza," a circular pizza arrives sitting on a circular cardboard base and wrapped in a white paper bag/envelope with the open end of the envelope stapled closed.
The pizza is more of a thin crust style pizza but not New York style thin. It's thicker and chewier. It's not puffy on the ends like a Domino's pizza crust. In fact it's the same thickness through out the whole pizza. If it's made properly the dough in the middle will be a little undercooked because of all the cheese that is put on it. And a key to identifying a proper Chicago neighborhood pizza is that the pizza is cut in squares, not triangles. This means the pizza is cut in straight lines across the entire pizza which intersects at right angles rather than at the center. This is not unlike the street grid system used when the city streets were rebuilt following the great Chicago fire in the late 1800's. This means one has the choice to have a piece with the crust on the end or a piece from the center without any crust on the end of it. Also because the pizza is round, the pizza will have four pieces that are triangle shaped one at each corner. Some people are particular to those little triangle pieces.
The pizza is nothing special, it is just good. No one thing overwhelms an other. The sauce is simple but good and blends well with the thin and chewy crust which is not too crunchy or flaky and not too chewy or fluffy. The topping are generously proportioned but not overloaded. And the cheese is piled on chewy, gooey goodness typical of Wisconsin dairy farms. It usually costs about $4 to $7 per person, depending on your appetite .
And that, my friend is a typical Chicago pizza.
On one of my road trips which took me through North Carolina, I naively ordered pizza from a local neighborhood pizzeria . Anticipating the routine regular pizza I had always gotten in every locally owned pizzeria in Chicago. I have found that while most folks know about Chicago style deep dish pizza they are not so familiar with the regular style pizza or in the particular case of the local North Carolina pizza place I was visiting, they are not even familiar with edible pizza. As I traveled and lived through out the country, I found different places try to mimic "Chicago Style Deep Dish", "New York", or "California." But most places only know or in the case of the North Carolina city I was visiting, prefer places like Pizza Hut or Domino's and then I began to understand how a restaurants like that exist.
When I moved to Austin, it was only a matter of time when I was going to need my fix of a good pizza. Now I believe in the, "When in Rome do as the Roman's do..." philosophy and so I ate my share of local Austin pizza. After a while I started asking if there was anything similar to Chicago style and tried what was recommended , but I never found the regular old authentic neighborhood pizza in Austin that was so readily available in Chicago.
I got so desperate that I decided I was just going to make my own. And so tapping my Chicago roots and memories of those first jobs as a youth working in the local pizzeria I started making my own regular neighborhood pizza at home. Now living in and loving Austin naturally has its influence so using all organic ingredients , I recreated satisfactory version of the regular Chicago neighborhood pizza I grew up on. When I started sharing with some folks who were unfamiliar with typical Chicago pizza they really went crazy for the stuff. So much so that they started to come by the house in hopes that I might make some more of the "really good pizza." Realizing that I may have uncovered one of the main purposes life brought me to Austin, I set out to spread the goodness that many of the local folks were calling "kick butt" pizza. I was just calling it "regular" pizza. And where else would one serve "Kick Butt” Pizza but at a place that serves "Kick Butt" Coffee.
So here we are.
Rich, (Our Kick Butt Pizza Barista)
