Friday is National Deep Dish Pizza Day, for those who celebrate, and Lou Malnati’s is taking the opportunity to introduce its newest variant: pizza dribbled with Mike’s Hot Honey. The cupped pepperonis are intended to help hold the honey in place.
Neil Steinberg/Sun-Times
Why is everybody so worried? Getting people back downtown is easy. All you have to do is offer them deep dish pizza drizzled with hot honey.
Well, it worked for me. Wednesday I was more than happy to head out in a biting snow squall to Rush Street, for Lou Malnati’s debut of the latest twist on Chicago’s beloved local dish.
I actually had two goals.
First, I wanted to taste it myself — pizza with hot honey? Intriguing. Second, I could share the news with a startled public. Lou’s is debuting the dish Friday. I was ahead of the curve. I thought.
Turns out, alas, I’m not in the vanguard. Nor is Lou’s, for that matter: Pizza Hut rolled out its hot honey pizza last month.
When I bragged to my older son, who lives in Jersey City, that I would be among the elite, invited to sample the new sensation, he advised me to immediately familiarize myself with Mike’s Hot Honey, the very brand tying the knot with Lou’s this week.
“You’re a little late,” laughed Mike Kurtz, reached by phone.
Kurtz was studying Portuguese in Brazil 20 years ago when he walked into a small pizza parlor that placed jars of honey infused with chili peppers on the tables. The taste stayed with him, and he experimented during his college years, which began at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He moved east, and squirted hot honey on pizzas at the Brooklyn pizzeria where he worked.
It’s so obvious, now — you splash hot sauce on chicken; you pour honey. But it never occurred to me to combine the two. That’s why some men run growing $40 million companies — Mike’s Hot Honey is on the menu in 3,000 restaurants and sold in 30,000 retail establishments nationwide — and some are wage slaves jammed onto the No. 36 bus going up State Street, excited at the prospect of free pizza.
“We created the category,” said Kurtz, who began selling bottles of hot honey from the Flatbush pizzeria in 2010. “It’s kinda crazy. Two of nature’s most unique and wonderful things coming together, chili peppers and honey. you’d think it would have been done before, but it hadn’t been done.”
The Brooklyn angle worries me. “An instant classic on the New York pizza scene” Lou’s boasts, perhaps unwisely. Chicagoans can be brutal when rejecting anything that suggests Gotham — Nathan’s hot dogs, The Limelight, Howard Stern.
With good reason. New York pizza is a large greasy slice flopping over a white styrofoam plate, eaten amongst strangers while walking along sidewalks piled with garbage. Chicago pizza is thick, superlative, Lou Malnati’s deep dish, spinach and mushroom, uncut, with the butter crust, enjoyed in comfort with family and friends.
Of course there are others: the sui generis Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder; Uno’s, the birthplace of deep dish, with their distinctive corn meal crust; and the pinnacle, the great black carbonized disc served at Burt’s in Morton Grove — where I promptly invited Kurtz to dine when he returns to Chicago for the Restaurant Show in May.
I reminded Kurtz that too many Chicagoans crazily care how strangers dress their fast food — I could see the no-ketchup-on-hot-dogs morality police going after those who dare put honey on pizza. Look at how dimly pineapple on pizza is viewed.
“Obviously pineapple is a very polarizing topping,” he said. “Personally I like pineapple on pizza,. There are passionate advocates in both camps, for and against. I think that sweetness when paired with the right topping can be a compliment to the savory notes of the pizza.”
Space dwindles. Anything I’m missing? Oh right, the hot honey pizza. The taste was surprising. There was an initial pulse of heat, but nothing terrible. Not like those hot chicken sandwiches that make your lips burn.
“In deep dish, the fat from the pie absorbs some of that heat so it’s not going to blow you away,” explained Kurtz.
I settled down to eat one piece, then another, enjoying a complex flavor that was never too sweet. Mozzarella, sausage, a touch of giardiniera. The pizza is topped with little cupped pepperoni intended to hold the honey. Subtle. I liked it. Typically, my Lou’s order is sacrosanct — deep dish spinach and mushroom, uncut, with the butter crust. Any deviation is diminishment. But I could see ordering hot honey pizza, if only to share the novelty with loved ones.
“A perfect combination of flavors,” agreed David Jude Green, a faculty member at Columbia College and one of the initiates at the debut, polled to confirm my impressions. “This is a great marriage.”