Pizza is in my blood and I eat even more of it with a six-year-old boy in tow (or towing me to gym birthday parties): in town at restaurants including V&N, D'amato's, Nella, Coalfire and Forno Rosso, while traveling in good pizza towns like Minneapolis and New York and Florence every few years, at special events including Floriole pizza Friday and Gaetano's experiements and demos at Eataly, in my recurring dreams of Great Lake and the Villa Park Aurelio's of the 80s. Styles I enjoy include even ridiculously overstuffed, Quad Cities Wheat Thins, St. Louis processed, and California Hawaiian. Basic ingredients yield complex and interesting harmonies over varying geographic, temperature, and time distances. It's all good.
(except when execution is bad. Worst pizza ever: Kinderhook Tap barbecue chicken. Every. single. thing. wrong.)I don't think pizza gets better than Stop 50. I've probably said this before, but every time I'm back there I'm more impressed. A gorgonzola, walnut, local sausage, garden oregano - just a pinch or slice of each ingredient on each wedge of perfect charred bread-candy, melting on the palate - is a transcendent thing. Not because it necessarily has to be thin or homegrown or fussy, but because it takes deliciousness to an artistically balanced level. It pleases every sense for a foodie and a kiddo. There are about five interesting things that happen just to your teeth as you bite through it.
I could be just as potentially happy with something from Wells Brothers or Art of Pizza or Freddy's in Cicero or VPN in the Boot, but somehow Stop 50 has found the extra magic. This is before getting into what wood-fired broccoli with charred lemon and garlic taste like in late March, or the quality of the grated parmigiano on the appetizer plate snowing in the fiery sausage-stuffed peppers, or what an order of the s'mores being run through the restaurant does to the face of every kid or kid at heart in the house. This is truly a special place in a region of special places, and a pinnacle pie in a blessed greater Chicagoland of diversely excellent pizza.