In the suburbs of Chicago, where Brittany and Brennan Grosvenor grew up, a Friday night family dinner always boiled down to a simple, localized binary: thin-crust, deep-dish, or double-dough. Today, the couple runs Proof, a pizzeria in Portland, Oregon, where they serve the very same style of pie that defined their Midwestern childhood. While they once used the shorthand of “thin-crust,” that vernacular has increasingly given way to a nationally recognized term: tavern-style. Over the past few years, this unassuming pizza trend has quietly swept across the United States from coast to coast, capturing the imagination—and appetites—of diners far beyond the Midwest.
Outsiders often associate the Windy City with its famous, tourist-beckoning deep-dish pizza, but Brittany notes that this stereotype simply does not reflect reality. Deep-dish, she explains, is reserved for rare occasions rather than the weekly routine. The pizza that actually fuels local life—appearing weekly on kitchen tables, at sports watch parties, and at children’s birthday celebrations—is almost always tavern-style.
This style of pizza is deeply entrenched across the Midwest. Cities and regions including Chicago, Milwaukee, Minnesota, and St. Louis all tout their own local variations of the pie. Characteristically, tavern-style pizza is known for its thin, cracker-like crust that is baked until crisp and cut into a grid of small squares, often called a "party cut," instead of traditional triangular slices. Depending on the specific region or the nostalgic neighborhood parlor of one’s youth, the sauce might lean sweet or spicy. Yet the core selling point remains its exceptional lightness and crispness. Writing for Esquire in 2023, critic Omar Mamoon described the variant as a direct foil to the famously thick Detroit-style pizza, which enjoyed its own massive moment in the spotlight during the late 2010s.
The beauty of the tavern-style pie lies fundamentally in its shareability. Cutting a pizza into a grid yields significantly more individual bites than standard triangular slices, explains Bradley Shorten, the culinary force behind Kim’s Uncle Pizza in his hometown Chicago suburb of Westmont, Illinois, and the recently opened La Merna in Washington, D.C. Pizzas cut into small, manageable squares make for ideal drinking food, particularly because they fit neatly on a cocktail napkin.
According to Shorten, the hallmark of a properly executed tavern-style pie is that every single square features a balanced distribution of ingredients, with toppings extending all the way to the outer edge of the crust. And while the four small, crispy corner pieces might not technically be the largest or most uniform slices on the tray, Shorten notes that they are invariably the ones everyone reaches for first, especially if those diners happen to be from Chicago.
Over the past few years, as neighborhood taverns have become growing fixations for a new wave of restaurateurs, party-cut pizzas and tavern-style spots have become ubiquitous. Recent openings include Keepers in New York City; One Trick Pony in Fort Worth, Texas; Tillie’s Tavern Pizza in Wheat Ridge, Colorado; and establishments like Zarella and Dimmi Dimmi Corner Italian in Chicago, where the style has always been abundant. For many Midwestern transplants, these nationwide openings offer a welcome opportunity to correct the historical record regarding their hometown’s true pizza culture, while giving other regional styles a chance to claim their stake in the national conversation.
When Mike Fadem opened the second location of his popular New York City pizzeria Ops—a spot celebrated for its wood-fired, Neapolitan-esque pies featuring leopard-spotted crusts and pliant dough—he wanted to offer something entirely different. Fadem originally hails from St. Louis, where the local pizza tradition features a super-thin profile. Despite his personal fondness for it, Fadem readily admits that it might not represent the absolute pinnacle of tavern pizza, acknowledging that some critics take issue with its traditional use of Provel, a gooey processed cheese product. The broader evolutionary trajectory of tavern-style pizza, he explains, resembles a game of telephone: St. Louis-style pizza derived from thin-crust Chicago pizza, which itself ultimately evolved from Neapolitan roots, with each geographic leap bringing distinct divergences.
Meanwhile, one of Fadem’s employees at Ops is from New Jersey, a state with its own fiercely proud thin-crust tavern and bar-style pizza tradition, much like the devoted following enjoyed by the distinct bar pies of the Boston area. This intersection of regional influences sparked an idea for Fadem: could they create an Ops-specific interpretation of the style? Given that Ops is already renowned for its sourdough, Fadem also wanted to highlight the rich, complex flavors of whole grains while achieving an intense crispiness that he knew would appeal to New York diners.
The resulting creation was added to the menu under the regionally agnostic name "tavernetta." Although St. Louis and New Jersey served as his initial points of inspiration, Fadem’s extensive research ultimately revealed that the finest iterations of the style resided in Milwaukee. The Tavernetta has not displaced the other pizzas on the restaurant’s menu; instead, it is routinely ordered as an addition to the meal, with most dining groups opting to grab at least one for the table.
In Los Angeles, the cocktail lounge Bar Next Door celebrated its third anniversary by expanding its offerings to include a dedicated food menu. Previously, the bar permitted patrons to bring in pies from Prince Street Pizza next door, an arrangement facilitated by the fact that Prince Street co-owner Lawrence Longo is a partner in the bar.
However, as bar owner and beverage director Brynn Smith points out, consuming a heavy slice of traditional thick-crust pizza can sometimes leave a customer feeling full and ready to head home early. The primary business objective for Bar Next Door is encouraging patrons to linger a little longer and order more drinks. To achieve this, Smith determined that tavern-style pizza would be the ideal culinary accompaniment. The fact that these pizzas—listed on the menu as "bar pies" to complement the establishment’s name—are crafted exclusively for the bar by Prince Street provides yet another compelling reason for locals to venture out for the evening.
The fundamental concept of the neighborhood tavern as a social, convivial space remains inextricably linked to the tavern-style pizza experience. Shorten’s overarching vision for La Merna—which he operates alongside his wife, Meg Schmitt, who grew up in St. Louis—was to recreate the authentic atmosphere of a classic Chicago dive bar or a Wisconsin supper club. These are spaces defined by wood-paneled walls and checkered floors, where guests can slide into red leather booths, order pitchers of beer alongside shared pizzas, and settle in for an unhurried evening.
As observers of contemporary dining culture have noted, the rising appeal of the cozy tavern aesthetic across restaurants nationwide is rooted in a desire for spaces that feel genuinely homey and lived-in. In these environments, diners are invited to sprawl out, shed their pretense, and embrace a welcoming familiarity. For many people, this sentiment is perfectly embodied by the archetype of the hometown pizza shop, an institution that remains permanently tethered in the cultural imagination to the comforts of a simpler era.
This deep sense of nostalgia and place is precisely what motivated the Grosvenors in Oregon to begin serving their own interpretations of Bosco sticks, the cheese-stuffed breadsticks familiar to anyone who navigated Midwestern school cafeterias, alongside classic Italian beef sandwiches topped with giardiniera. While they could occasionally source certain Midwestern specialties around Portland, they were frequently frustrated by the inability to find everything under one roof. As Brennan Grosvenor explains, their goal is simply to embody the authentic feeling of walking into a neighborhood tavern in Chicago and finding a menu that delivers on every expectation.