There is a current renaissance in the Chicago food scene of new, young (and many, first and second generation) interfaith, intercultural kids who are messing around with tradition in the most delicious ways. 

There is Chef Won Kim’s Polish sausage served with kimchi and soju mustard at Kimski’s in Bridgeport and the VietDip at Phodega in Wicker Park that marries Chicago style Italian Beef with banh mi-like ingredients. The city is teaming with younger chefs popping up at coffee shops and dive bars, in temporary markets and local breweries, who are reviving a love of traditional, city centric cuisines infused with flavors from their parents or grandparents or their own country of origin.  

There is no better example of this kind of mixing innovation, a sampling of sorts common in hip hop cultural and all diasporic practices.  

Now, young chefs, who live outside of their family’s homeland and are hip-hop centered or generationally adjacent, are applying those coupling and co-mingling aesthetics to food. It’s a thriving while surviving optimism, many groups have learned as a coping mechanism, to take the best of something over here, and mesh it miraculously with something unexpected over there. 

A practice of navigating a stranger’s land, and palate, that folks have succeeded in for millennial. In these traditions, the creative minds and hands at Novel Pizza Cafe are creating all city mashups on tavern and pan style pies at 1759 W. 19th St., in the near south side neighborhood of Pilsen. 

On the first floor of an unassuming two-flat, right down the block from The National Museum of Mexican Art, Chefs and Entrepreneurs Ryan Catolico, Francis Almeda and Enrique Huizar concoct new visions for the Italian pie in a Mexican (and rapidly changing, and formerly Czech) neighborhood. 

Catolico and Almeda are Filipino cousins who were dreaming of how to turn their passion of cooking into something more than a homemade idea, while preserving their cultural imperative of feeding people, or in Tagalog, kamayan, a kind of communal feast.  

So much of immigrant culture and faith is centered in sharing food and a pie is too big for one person and therefore a perfect vehicle in which to break bread.  

Almeda, who is quietly becoming one of the city’s hardest-working moguls, built a northside coffee shop for this kind of dreaming at Side Practice Coffee in Ravenswood and is creating a similar coffee shop / community center / incubator for creatives and entrepreneurial creativity at Drip Collective in the west, West Loop. The team of cousins met Chef Huizar, through Catolico’s wife, who also manages Novel, because the two went to Catholic school together in Brighton Park.  

Huizar was working in a beloved southside pizzeria perfecting the tavern style pie, while the cousins were making pies in a pan, something closer to Detroit style, out of their northside coffee shop.  

Novel as in novel idea, as in innovative, to pair the slightly sweet and savory longanisa sausage common in Philippine cuisine with the bright and spicy pickled giardiniera, typically found on Italian deli sandwiches. 

Through conversations and experimentation, they agreed to throw in together, as partners, at Novel Pizza Cafe. Novel as in novel idea, as in innovative, to pair the slightly sweet and savory longanisa sausage common in Philippine cuisine with the bright and spicy pickled giardiniera, typically found on Italian deli sandwiches. 

This pizza, topped with the fluffiest clouds of ricotta, is a prime example of the kind of originality occurring in Chicago kitchens these days, and the sort of familiar and unfamiliar introductions and crossings taking place at Novel.  

There is a common faux pas when discussing Chicago style foods. What comes to mind often for the uninitiated, outside of the beef hotdog dragged through the garden, is the deep-dish pizza, the cheese and meat sort of quiche that dominates the landscape.  

And don’t get me wrong, there is a time and a place for deep dish, it usually involves out of town family or friends who want to visit the great institutions like Lou Malnati’s to be reminded of their childhood or check off a list of things to do – AI generated.  

But if you spend any time here, in the neighborhoods and local taverns and surrounding Chicagoland micro strip malls, you’ll know the variety of Chicago style pizza is vast, and the king of the pie, in my opinion, is not the gluttonous, over-done brick casserole but the thin, cracker-like, square cut dream, known as tavern style pizza. 

Every neighborhood has their own iteration of sauce and toppings, but in the city that industrialized meat distribution, the tavern style pie was rote, a red sauce with cheese and beef or pork toppings. But the children of immigrants who came to populate those local taverns in the first place or grew up hearing of their lore, have ingenuity about ways to incorporate the flavors of their homeland into the city’s local palette.  

Novel is not just a place for Pizza. Coffee service begins in the morning and carries over the unique concoctions occurring at Drip Collective. Lattes infused with ube or five spice, the sort of mixtures an industrial sugary latte couldn’t compare, are a refreshing twist on your daily go-to that offers spices and styles from all over the globe.  

At Novel, there is a homestyle, familial feel that emanates from the kitchen and the counter. The place is small, and they sell out of most of their pies on the weekend, but this is a must see and taste in person sort of parlor, where even my vegan and lactose intolerant homies have options.  

From the mural on the outside wall to the avant-garde collaborations happening in the oven and at the espresso machine, there is something profound happening at Novel Pizza Cafe, a furthering of a movement and crossing that is bigger than pizza and has to do with satisfying our taste buds, yes, but is also bringing us all a little bit closer together helping to build our potluck nation.