An RBG-Themed Virtual Pizzeria Opens Up In Chicago
Ruth's Panmade Pizza is a new virtual kitchen from the Fifty/50 restaurant group in Chicago, best known for its quad-cities style pizza chain, Roots Pizza. The pizzeria, inspired by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is donating 10% of all proceeds to the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the ACLU of Illinois.
The pandemic has brought us Chicagoans a lot of brand new pizza places that run the gamut of Detroit-style, tavern-style, New York-style, grandma, Sicilian, and deep dish. We love our pizza and you're going to have to pry the slices out of our sauce covered hands, you hear me?! Ruth's pizza specialty is a buttery crusted deep dish pie with playful fillings, and this thing is tall. There's also a healthy assortment of sandwiches, wings, and salads to go with it, along with a cheesecake made with Baby Ruth candy bar pieces.
Full disclosure: I know one of the owners, Scott Weiner, from my time working as a pizza chef, and he visited me at home to drop off a pie, the RBG Supreme, is a take on a taco pizza. But you could honestly load these pizzas with anything, because the star of the show was the thick end pieces of crust. Crust is sometimes considered an afterthought, but in this case, the butter really sang.
People like to talk trash about deep dish pizza, but it's a well-known local fact that most of us eat the thinner tavern-style pizza. New deep dish pizzerias are few and far between; it's more of a point of pride that we have it as a choice in our vast selection of pies. Was RBG a fan of deep dish pizza? To be honest, I haven't the foggiest clue. I did a little research (aka Googled this) and can't find any information to back it up, but I'm sure she'd be happy with the support for the ACLU.
As this is a virtual kitchen, it's online ordering only. You're going to see a lot of concepts like this spring up in urban environments in the next few months. When ordering, do your research to make sure you're actually ordering from local businesses, and not, say, Chuck E. Cheese in disguise.