City Pizza: good, not great NY style in the Loop

The lunch hour today found me mourning the closing of my old favorite by the Board of Trade, 65 Kitchen (overflowing containers of cheap Chinese food). While commiserating with a portly, red-faced trader who looked like Mr. Callahan from Tommy Boy, I noticed lines forming at a new place nearby: City Pizza. Could pizza fill the void in my heart left by absence of greasy Chinese food?


Not shown in this badly taken interior pic is the counter guy tossing a huge disk of pizza dough behind the divider. When I say huge, I mean it was big enough to obscure his entire torso. Despite that, he had a deft hand with the toss and easily shook it off the peel into the oven. A far cry from my clumsy homemade pizza efforts and a good sign for good pizza to come in my opinion.


I think cheese slices are usually for kids and wimps but when judging a new pizza place you gotta stick with the basics. This was a tasty slice with bright-tasting tomato sauce and salty, almost pungent cheese. The super-thin crust is very close to what I remember from New York slice places: crisp on the bottom, with a kind of gummy layer in the middle from the sauce and cheese melting into the bread, with a nice bready hole structure and chew.



I would almost call it an excellent slice if not for two things. First, the price. A cheese slice costs $5 which is about twice what it should be. I get that the Loop is expensive but if NY joints can sling out dollar slices while paying the most expensive rents on the planet then we should be able to get a good slice in Chicago for less than $5. Second, there is just a little too much sugar in the dough. A pinch of sugar is OK in an American- or NY-style thin crust but not so much that I can detect it. They have got the crust texture down pat but if they could reduce the sugar by about 50% they would hit the "sweet spot" (hee hee).

City Pizza
111 W Jackson Blvd

A cheese slice costs $5

sundevilpeg wrote:

A cheese slice costs $5

Yes, it is pretty bad. But compared to the other slice options downtown like Luke's it is almost on par. Even Sbarro in Thompson Center costs almost $4. The overpriced downtown slice is not limited to City Pizza that's for sure.

Yes, it is pretty bad. But compared to the other slice options downtown like Luke's it is almost on par. Even Sbarro in Thompson Center costs almost $4. The overpriced downtown slice is not limited to City Pizza that's for sure.

I went to lunch at Terrace on Clark (77 W. Wacker at Clark) with my old boss at DLA Piper today. Had a big-ass Cobb salad, with avocado and bleu cheese and everything else it was supposed to have. Delicious - and only $9, and in a prime piece of riverside real estate. Two slices would have cost a buck more. Preposterous!

Ive been there a few times. I think the price is reasonable considering the size of the slice. I agree it is a hair too sweet, but overall the pizza is very good. Even better is the meatball parm sandwich which contains a generous amount of meatballs, chesse, and sauce. Fantastic.