LOVE, WAR & STUFFED PIZZA

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Chicago is known as a pizza city, whether it is the thin crust that is cut into squares, the deep dish invented by Ike Sewell and Richard Riccardo in 1943, or the stuffed pizza invented by Rocco Palese in the early 1970s. In Love, War & Stuffed Pizza, Marisa Palese pays loving tribute to her parents, Rocco and Annunziata Palese, their immigrant story, and their creation of a now often imitated Chicago original. I've been enjoying Nancy's pizza since the 1970s and it is the stuffed pizza I introduce out-of-towners to when they want to try stuffed pizza, so when I heard Palese was telling her story, I was quite interested.

Rocco and Annunziata Palese, as well as their children, were born in Italy and moved to Chicago in 1969. Within two years, Rocco had purchased a Guy's pizza restaurant., the first of several restaurants he owned before eventually opening Nancy's in 1973. In response to customer's requests to start serving Chicago deep dish pizza, Rocco elected to create his own style of pizza, based on his mother's scarciedda. In describing her father's invention, Palese is careful to explain the difference between deep dish pizza and stuffed pizza, an important distinction that makes the versions very different, but which many Chicagoans and non-Chicagoans don't quite grasp and use interchangeably. She also makes it clear that Rocco's quest to create a pizza based on scarciedda was a reason he and his cousin had a falling out over their business.

While it would be nice to think that the Rocco's success was easily achievable, Palese makes it clear from the first pages that they had a rocky story. The history of Nancy's includes betrayal by former employees who lied to Rocco and used his creation to found their own pizza chain. As immigrants whose focus was on running and building their own business, the Paleses did not know enough about the U.S. legal system to protect their intellectual property. Their attempts to franchise also found themselves facing a franchisee who decided to destroy Rocco's stories, literally, by firebombing two of his restaurants (the one I frequented was bombed twice). Eventually, through Marisa Palese's dogged determination, three people were convicted of the bombings. These setbacks, and friends' and family's reactions to them have clearly hurt Palese, and she allows her lingering pain to come through in her narrative.

Nancy's story is not all a tale of hardship. From the earliest days of serving stuffed pizza, they were recognized by Chicago's culinary scene, winning several awards and having champions among the city's food critics. They were also luck to find Dave Howey, who tried Nancy's while a college student. Howey built up a relationship with Rocco and eventually asked about franchising. Rocco's experience with Howey was much more successful and productive that other experiments and Hovey and his family have continued to partner with the Paleses and build Nancy's to its current state, including restaurants in North Carolina, Missouri, and Georgia (and I've introduced friends to Nancy's in Atlanta).

The book ends Palese's retirement from the restaurant industry and a note about a name change for the Nancy's restaurant that I tend to go to, a change I learned about last year when I took friends from Detroit there to introduce them to Rocco's creation. Palese's husband told us about the change, but promised that Nancy's pizza would still be on the menu. I'm happy to report that on another visit after the name change that the pizza is the same as it was for the fifty years the Palese family ran the restaurant. Having read Palese's story, I'm looking at my schedule to find a time to run down to Nancy's for a stuffed pizza.

As a final note, Nancy's has begun to sell frozen thin crust pizzas in Chicago area grocery stores. I've invited my daughter's friends to taste test a bracket of nine different frozen thin crust pizzas from the Chicago stores and Nancy's was the winner, edging out Connie's.

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