Pick The Best Pizza In Chicago For Our 2016 Pizza Place Bracket (Part 1)

By Anthony Todd in Food on Sep 22, 2016 4:00PM

(Photo: JB Alberto's Facebook)

Every five minutes, it seems, someone (us included) comes out with another list of the best pizza places in Chicago. Luckily, we're a city that really, really loves pizza, so there are plenty of entries to choose from. Rather than create another list, this year we've decided to put the question to you, the readers.

We had so much fun with our 2016 beer bracket that we're using the same formula: A 32-entry, single-elimination tournament, with all of the seeds randomly assigned. How did we pick which places to feature? We combed our previous best-of lists, checked out the lists we most respect from other local food writers (thanks to Mike Gebert and Steve Dolinsky for their hard work tasting pizzas all over town) and added a a few of our own favorites.

Rather than break the list up into deep dish, thin crust, neapolitan and stuffed, we're going joint by joint. If one place has better thin but another has better deep dish, you'll have to do some soul searching to figure out which is more important to you. Scientific? Nah. Fun? We hope so.

More than anything else, this bracket should give you a really great excuse to add some new pizza places to your list. We've tried to represent the whole city, so print this list out and put it on your refrigerator. In case you're looking for a more complete list of places, with addresses and websites, check here.

The process is pretty simple. Below is the complete bracket, and below that are one-on-one matchups between 16 different pizza places, the first half of the list. Vote on some or all of them, depending on your level of passion and what you've tried. On Friday morning, we'll post the other 16.

This first round poll will remain open until Tuesday, Sept. 27 at 10 p.m. Start voting!