Back in the days when one couldn’t possibly keep up with all the restaurants that opened every week in Chicago, I used to get cranky about all the cheffy burgers I was supposed to keep tabs on. The tonnage of terrible barbecue I was obligated to eat drove me into a rage I could barely contain. But now that everybody’s putting out pandemic pizza, I’m actually delighted by the proliferation of pie at nimble operations such as Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream (a collaboration between Eat Free Pizza, Kimski, and Pretty Cool Ice Cream); or Oriole chef Noah Sandoval’s Sicilian slices at Pizza Friendly Pizza; or Milly’s Pizza in the Pan, a Burt’s Place tribute operating out of a Logan Square ghost kitchen.
Back in May, he launched a monthly pop-up in which he auctions off tavern-style pizzas to his Instagram followers, whose money goes directly to a charity of Carruthers’s choice. “This pizza thing started as a way to keep myself sane during the shutdown,” he messaged me a while back. “You’ve met me, so I think you probably remember that I’m one of those really fidgety, talkative, possibly annoying personality types. My job is very social, my off-hours pop-ups and stuff are very social. That was all gone, so I started doing pizza and movies with the kids on Fridays to get some routine going. I was super privileged to have a family around, to still have a job, to have food, etc. It’s just that my mental health in those early days wasn’t great. The uncertainty of everything was just something that I was almost specifically not built for. So doing one thing over and over and over—then kind of obsessing about it for the next 6 days—helped.
Awww, right?
