I'm sure you've had that experience: You're looking at someone's face and thinking, "I know I've seen this guy before," but his name eludes you. I just had the same thing happen to me while I was looking at the logo for a restaurant. An Old Chicago is moving into Mockingbird Station, and while I was looking at pictures of pizza and pepperoni bread knots I kept having this weird sensation of gut-bomb déjà vu.
Ah, that Old Chicago. It's all coming back to me now.
It was almost a year ago, and I was in Manhattan, Kansas, visiting family. I asked what our dinner options were and she said "Old Chicago." I asked a few more times, but the answer kept coming up the same, that casual pizza joint and beer pub opened by the same guys that dropped Gordon Biersch locations all over the country. It wasn't that she was obsessed or had a brain tumor, it's just there aren't a lot of dining options in the middle of Kansas. So we went to Old Chicago and stuffed our faces full of pizza
And now that same company is preparing to drop one mess of a pizza on Dallas. It's called the Double Deckaroni and it requires no fewer than four people to put a dent in it. For starters it's a deep dish pizza, which means it eats like a lasagna as much as it does your traditional pie, and then it's topped with so much pepperoni it's covered like a fish is protected with scales. There's hot sauce in the mix, and you have to eat the whole mess with a fork and knife. I won't even bring up the sodium.
The rest of the menu is a pretty predictable selection of sandwiches and salads -- the kind of menu you'd expect from a restaurant with nearly 100 locations. In fact, if you blinked you might have missed another Old Chicago that opened and closed in Addison.
The new Old Chicago is moving into the back corner of Mockingbird Station, into the spot that used to house Vapiano. If all goes according to plan they'll open their doors on December 5 and launch their arterial assault on any Dallasites willing to walk through the front door. Expect 30-plus taps of beer and more pizzas that will put you in a coma before you can find your car in the Mockingbird parking garage.
5319 Mockingbird Station, Ste 100, 214-821-3027, oldchicago.com
