Kim's Uncle Pizza co-owner Billy Federighi pulls a pizza out of the over, in Westmont on Thursday, Aug. 11, 2022. (Vincent D. Johnson / Chicago Tribune)

Pizza may be the most unifying and polarizing of Chicago’s iconic foods. When outsiders attack, as New Yorkers predictably do, we circle the deep-dish walls in defense. Some will dissent, claiming real Chicagoans don’t eat thick crust pies, but they’re wrong, because, of course, we do.

Still, our Proustian pizza is more likely a thin crust tavern-style, cut in squares, with four coveted corners, each as prized by the connoisseur as a roast chicken oyster, known to the French as le sot-l’y-laisse (“The fool leaves it there.”). A lot of our beloved tavern pizza hasn’t been that good, but you learn to peel away the layers and leave behind the bad stuff, like so much of distant childhood remembrances.

There’s nothing bad to forget at Kim’s Uncle Pizza. The revival of a small suburban pizzeria goes beyond reclaiming the craft of tavern pizza; it is a holistic destination experience. You will hold more than a crisp-crusted slice and unlock a moment of possibilities realized.

While diners choose their own toppings, sausage and giardiniera pizza has become something of a signature.

Sausage pizza at Kim's Uncle Pizza, 207 N. Cass Ave., Westmont, the first dedicated pizzeria by the pizza-makers behind Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream, making destination Chicago-style tavern pies in the suburbs, as seen here on Sept. 9, 2022. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

“It’s just pure Chicago,” said pizzaiolo Bradley Shorten. He owns Kim’s with spouses Billy and Cecily Federighi, two of his best friends (together they’re the trio behind the project formerly known as Eat Free Pizza), plus pivotal partner Ed Marszewski of Marz Brewing.

Their sausage is a thing on its own, fatty and on the spicy side, finished with fresh herbs.

“We had been making it for years on our own,” Shorten said, “grinding and seasoning it ourselves.”

But then came Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream, which opened in pandemic takeout mode in summer 2020 to popular and critical acclaim. They couldn’t produce sausage at that scale, so they turned to Makowski’s Real Sausage Co. The historic manufacturer stands just a few blocks away in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood.

“We still have to hand mix all our fresh herbs in at the end,” Shorten said. “But it’s totally worth it to get a consistent product, and they just nail it.”

They turned to J.P. Graziano, another fabled family business, for the hot giardiniera.

The pizza’s sauce is also on the spicy side. They cook it down, caramelizing and sweetening the tomato, before spreading it to the edge of their extraordinary dough.

Previously, the pizzeria was known as Uncle Pete’s, and it had a sweet sauce, he added. They do hear about that from some former customers, of which he was one.

Shorten grew up in Westmont. When he stayed over at friends’ houses near the pizzeria, they would order delivery from the shop with a fateful future.

Former owner and new namesake Kim Sinclair bought Uncle Pete’s in 1971. She’s lifelong friends with fellow Korean American business owner Maria Marszewski, namesake and founder of Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar. Her sons worked at the pizzeria in their teens as cooks and delivery drivers.

Shorten, meanwhile, first learned how to make tavern pizza at the age of 15, at a Rosati’s within walking distance of his backyard.

“You don’t know that pizza job was the best job ever until you get older and you’ve gone through a whole bunch of other jobs,” he said. “Those were the best days of my life.”

Kim's Uncle Pizza owners Brad Shorten, from left, and Cecily and Billy Federighi sit in the dining area of the Westmont restaurant on Aug. 11, 2022. (Vincent D. Johnson / Chicago Tribune)

The future pizza partners didn’t meet until the Eat Free Pizza project in 2018, giving away free practice pizzas from an apartment in the city. Back then, it was Neapolitan and Sicilian, and ahead of their time, years before the pandemic sent us flocking to chefs’ homes to buy food.

They did not make tavern-style until a pizza tour took them behind the scenes of the legendary Pat’s Pizza in Lincoln Park, home to one of the finest and thinnest cracker crusts around Chicago.

As much as toppings typically get the glory, the crust is the true mark of pizza craft. At its rarefied best, tavern-style defies the laws of physics with crunch and flavor.

“This is a very thin pizza,” Shorten said. “Unless you have a crust that can handle it, why put all those ingredients on there and have this floppy thing you have to fold up?”

Hold up it does, perhaps most evident with their pepperoni pizza, reminiscent of the new school of Detroit-style squares in their exuberant excess.

“We just grab as much as we can and just drop it on there,” Shorten said about the pepperoni. “And then we go and do it again.”

The small rounds cup and char before they’re drizzled with Mike’s Hot Honey for sticky and intensely thoughtful slices.

Pepperoni pizza at Kim's Uncle Pizza, 207 N. Cass Ave., Westmont, the first dedicated pizzeria by the pizza-makers behind Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream, making destination Chicago-style tavern pies in the suburbs as seen on Sept. 9, 2022. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

A mushroom, onion and black olive pizza scatters thick-cut cremini and thinly sliced onion slivers across the crackly canvas. It’s finished with feathery ribbons of pecorino.

Shorten is reluctant to recommend toppings, unless he’s pressed to do so. This one ranks pretty high for him.

“That’s a veggie pizza that’s just my favorite combo,” he said.

That may be my favorite too, so far. The nutty, hard cheese wisps prove a prelude, like bubbles to Champagne, of the complex depth hidden. The crust is not just crisp, but deep with character.

“Billy is the doughboy,” Shorten said. “His research is hard on dough. He started working on a really dried-out dough, with really low hydration.”

A cracker crust, however, takes more than making just a cracker. First, they sheet the dough, rolling it out thin.

The dough rests in their temperature-controlled production kitchen at Marz. “They just sit there on a rack and cure,” Shorten said, “and become like a piece of leather.”

They transport the cured dough in bins to Kim’s.

“Right now that consistency does change a little bit, because we can’t control every single aspect about the humidity and stuff. That room is not controlled as much as we want at this point,” he said.

That is an extreme understatement; there’s no air conditioning at the tiny pizzeria. It’s astounding they achieve such a glorious crust, but especially under those conditions.

Meatball sandwich at Kim's Uncle Pizza, 207 N. Cass Ave., Westmont. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

A menu board hangs next to the counter displays where patrons order and pick up their food at Kim's Uncle Pizza, in Westmont, as seen on Aug. 11, 2022. (Vincent D. Johnson / Chicago Tribune)

An Italian sausage sandwich debuted at Kim’s, with links encasing their pizza sausage recipe, also made by Makowski. There’s also an Italian beef, and, of course, a combo. They’re built on classic Turano bread, dressed with the traditional sweet green peppers and/or J.P. Graziano hot giardiniera. You can order the sandwiches dry, wet or dipped, with optional mozzarella cheese.

The huge, hot sausages are carefully prepared, their casings impressively intact, no small feat since they’re cooked in the pizza oven. But we’re spoiled around Chicago, where beef stands often chargrill sausages to smoky effect. These links beg for a fire.

“The oven is our only cooking tool,” Shorten said. They don’t have a fryer either, hence the sides of Vitner’s potato chips. The Italian beef is sourced. “We’re not making that from scratch at the moment, but it’s something I think that we want to do.”

The Angry Chicagoan may be the most successful sandwich so far. With sausage, melted mozzarella, pizza sauce and hot giardiniera, it’s an interpretation of their sausage and giardiniera pizza in sandwich form.

“I’ve always kind of admired these pizzerias where they have these tiny menus,” Shorten said. “It’s just pizza and that’s it.”

If they can do that, and bring back the Sicilian-style squares with which they opened Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream, then by all means necessary, please. They made the coveted, thick-yet-airy slices at Kim’s, but only for Westmont Cruisin’ Nights, the weekly car show that has ended for the season.

“They’re labor intensive,” Shorten said. “And if you make 20 pans that morning, that’s it for your inventory for the day.”

They’re considering pre-order squares, but they’ve already paused online ordering at Kim’s. It’s not just the pizza-maker struggling with demand.

“It’s the little oven; she just can’t handle it,” Shorten said. They inherited a 1954 Faulds oven with the shop. “We can only do eight pizzas at most at a time, and she struggles with that.”

They don’t plan to ever replace her.

“That’s half the reason we wanted this place,” Shorten said. “She’s the smallest Faulds I’ve ever seen, and such a pretty oven.”

The 1954 Faulds oven at Kim's Uncle Pizza, in Westmont, as seen on Aug. 11, 2022. (Vincent D. Johnson / Chicago Tribune)

Some bowling trophies and photos left behind from the previous owner now decorate the interior walls of Kim's Uncle Pizza in Westmont on Aug. 11, 2022. (Vincent D. Johnson / Chicago Tribune)

She’s a part of the soul of the building itself, which seems to stand as a pizzeria version of the Prada store art installation near Marfa in Texas. The only two tables inside are a pair of burnt orange booths reclaimed from a factory cafeteria in Wisconsin. The interior wood paneling is repurposed floorboards from Marz Brewing. Brass wall sconces come from Shorten’s collection of lamps in his apartment.

“We’re not reinventing the wheel at all on this stuff,” he said. “There’s a pizzeria on every corner. If there were five more right on our street, that would be great.”

People just get sloppy and get messy with it, he added.

I grew up on lots of neighborhood pizza, too. Kim’s is the best of everything it could have been.

Open: Wednesday to Sunday, 4 to 9 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday

Prices: $17 (14-inch cheese pizza, one size), $3 (sausage topping), $2 (giardiniera topping), $11 (The Angry Chicagoan sandwich with bag of Vitner’s potato chips), $3 (2-liter bottle of RC Cola)

Accessibility: Not wheelchair accessible, no public restroom

Tribune rating: Between excellent and very good, 2½ stars

Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.

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