Is the best pizza the one you loved as a youth?
Dinner at The Silo
Pizza love is provincial.
When you ask someone their favorite pizza, they’ll usually tell you about the one they grew up with.
My early years were in the Chicago suburb of Skokie. Less than a five-minute walk from our home was a pizza restaurant called Pagliacci’s. I remember it had a small dining room, but we rarely ate there. Our pizza was ordered, someone—probably my dad—picked it up, and we ate it at home. I can’t tell you about the toppings, either, but I do remember that I thought it was the best food of my youth—granted, it was an extremely small sample size.
When people from that burb talk about pizza you’ll hear Alberti’s, LaRosa and a couple of others, but I’ll always stick up for Pagliacci’s, even though I haven’t had a slice of it in close to sixty years.
When I started high school, we moved north to Highland Park. That was where I first had Pan-style pizza. There are all kinds of different terms for this stuff but let’s call it thick as opposed to thin. Pretty simple, right?
One night, one of the neighbors brought home some pizzas from a place called The Silo. They had all of the neighbor kids over to sample this delicacy. Each slice was huge, thick and full of gooey cheese, tomato sauce and a topping—usually sausage or pepperoni. It didn’t take more than a bite or two to fall in love.
Every few months, someone would bring home a pizza from The Silo and the same thing would occur. It was a special event.
On the night before I left for college for the first time, my brother, sister and myself jumped in the car to have a sibling dinner at The Silo (I don’t know why we left the little bro at home. Sorry, man). This was in the days long before GPS or Waze so all we had was the address of the restaurant. What should have been a fifteen-minute ride turned into a two-hour road trip. We stopped two or three times to get directions. When we finally arrived, The Silo was closed. IT WAS MONDAY!!!
The reason for this remembrance is we had dinner at The Silo last night. The pizza you see at the top is what we had—sausage and mushroom. Is it as good as what I remembered back in high school? It’s pretty close! It did lose some points for taking almost an hour to be brought to us, but the fifty percent discount our waiter gave us more than made up for it. Is it still my favorite pizza? Probably not but it’s pretty close.
It’s good to know that some things from your long-ago youth still hold up. Hmm—I wonder what ever happened to Pagliacci’s? And by the way, The Silo is still closed on Mondays—-sigh.