Thunderbird Pies Introduces Crispy Tavern-Style Pizza to Menu

The PILF Restaurant Group apparently wants to have a finger in every pie, at least of the pizza variety. They have Cane Rosso for Neapolitan-style, Zoli’s for New York and Sicilian and Thunderbird Pies for Detroit-style. Savvy readers should notice a glaring omission from this otherwise praise-worthy gamut of pizza styles, and if you said Chicago deep-dish we can no longer be friends.

The correct answer is, of course, tavern-style thin crust, the true Chicago style of pizza loved by locals for generations before the now-ubiquitous deep dish took hold in America’s psyche. Thankfully, tavern-style pizza is becoming more popular outside of Chicago and its burbs, and several places here now offer pretty good examples of this Windy City treat.

As of last week, Thunderbird Pies has finally joined that tasty club, primarily in response to the biggest complaint they get about Detroit-style pizza: It’s just too much food!

However, owner Jay Jerrier takes pains to distance their take on tavern-style pizza from the Chicago variety:

“(They’re) not Chicago thin cracker crust! They are crispy and have almost a biscuit-type crust… really buttery and savory. They have sauce and cheese spread edge to edge, which creates a crunchy, lacy texture to the crust.”

There’s another huge difference between the Chicago variety and what Thunderbird has christened Texas Tavern Style: Instead of the traditional round pizza cut into squares, the Thunderbird pie is a 12-inch square cut into triangular wedges.
“Who cares about geometry!” you say. “The taste is what’s important!” you scold. Well, sure ... but hear me out for a second. Let’s consider the king of comfort foods, the humble grilled cheese sandwich. After it’s prepared and before it is served it can be cut in half in two ways: perpendicularly or diagonally. Both versions have the same ingredients and cooking methods so they should taste the same. But who here really thinks that the diagonally-cut sandwich isn’t more satisfying? OK then. Shape matters.

But sure, let’s set aside our protractor for just a moment and actually talk about the pizzas themselves. How do they fare?

We ordered two, our go-to sausage and onion that we always use as a base of comparison across different establishments as well as a pepperoni, which is called the Connie on the menu. The Connie was $18, and the sausage and onion was $20, the latter slightly expensive but not ridiculously so. They arrived pretty quickly, which is another advantage tavern-style has over deep dish: no 40-minute cooking times.
Sure enough, they were cut into eight pieces, isosceles (or maybe equilateral? Be quiet, nerd) triangles if we can return to geometry one last time. The Connie had a generous abundance of pepperoni, forming the little caps so loved by many. The sausage and onion toppings were a bit sparse, especially compared to the pepperoni. Both had a good red sauce and were garnished with fresh basil.

The crust was pretty reminiscent of typical Chicago tavern-style thin crust, all the talk of biscuit butter notwithstanding. It was a bit less charred than the type you’ll get at Louie’s, for example, but it still easily lives in the family of tavern-style thin.
As to the shape of the slices: Well, one of the reasons for cutting tavern-style in small squares was that otherwise, the thin crust combined with ample toppings would cause sagging and drooping. It’s just easier to grab a square and pop it into your mouth. You can do that with one hand, so the other can be holding that mug of Old Style. The other reason, of course, is that it’s a lot easier to feed more people with the same amount of surface area. Each of our pizzas had eight slices, whereas the typical Chicago tavern style might have 16 to 20 pieces. Sure, the volume may be the same, but the brain doesn’t know any better.

The rationale we’ve heard from Thunderbird Pies is that the triangular slices provide more gooey crunchy crust edges, and this is true to a degree. However, growing up there were always those kids who didn’t like the well-done crust edges, and traditional tavern-style doesn’t leave those children behind; they can have any of the many centerpieces that are totally void of crust edges. Of course, these are the same kids who probably grew up to become adults who put ketchup on hot dogs, so let’s not worry about them too much. Maybe forcing everyone to eat the crust edges is a good thing after all.

So, at the end of the day, if you’re one that doesn’t care how their grilled cheese sandwiches are cut in half, then you’ll have no problem at all with Thunderbird Pie’s new thin pizzas. And even if you do, these are worth a try, prepared quickly by friendly staff with fresh ingredients, and you don’t have to worry about those thick and heavy Detroit pies weighing you down after the meal