Wooster St. Crust Makes It In Deep Dish Heaven

CHICAGO — Business is booming at Piece pizzeria, and not because owner Bill Jacobs is selling the deep-dish pies this city is known for. It’s because he’s serving up the kind of thin-crust apizza he grew up eating at Sally’s in New Haven.

Jacobs, a new Haven native, traces his pizza success back to a high school job at Ashley’s ice cream parlor, the generosity of a rock star, and some lucky connections brought about by another product of the Elm City — the Frisbee.

His tale also touches on three sets of entrepreneurial brothers from New Haven.

Jacobs, who’s 49, told his story on Sunday over basil and roasted red pepper pizza at Piece, his restaurant in the heart of the trendy Wicker Park section of Chicago. The pizzeria and brewery, which will celebrate its ninth birthday next week, was recently selected as the source of the second best pizza in the city by Chicago magazine.

Piece earned that honor by offering — as it says on the menu—“new haven-style” thin-crust pizza.

“Deep-dish is really not apizza,” Jacobs said, using the term of art for New Haven’s thin brick-oven fare invented on Wooster Street. ​“You can’t hold it.You can’t fold it. You have to eat it with a knife and fork.”

Ever since he arrived in Chicago in 1983, Jacobs saw a need for New Haven-style pizza, he said. It took him nearly 20 years, and a successful career in another food-based business, to fill that need.

Ashley’s Plants Seeds

Jacobs laid out the restaurant’s history, starting from its New Haven roots.

Jacobs grew up in Westville with three brothers. His dad, Richard Jacobs, is an attorney with an office on Orange Street that’s run by Bill’s mom. One of Bill’s brothers, Steven, is now a lawyer with their dad.

When the brothers were young, the family’s choice for pizza was Sally’s on Wooster Street. Family lore hads it that the Jacobses played a part in creating the first onion pizza. The story goes that one of Bill’s great-uncles, who owned the Jacobs Bros. Market on State and Chapel, went into Sally’s with an onion and said ​“cut this up and put it on a pizza,” Jacobs said.

In his senior year at Richard C. Lee High School (now home of the Yale School of Nursing), Jacobs got a job scooping Ashley’s ice cream on York Street shortly after the shop opened.

“I was Ashley’s second employee,” Jacobs said. Working at the ice cream parlor was a ​“huge inspiration” for him, Jacobs said. As he watched the owners, brothers Josh and Phil Karlin, develop their ice cream and build their business, Jacobs dreamed of finding his own product and starting a company of his own.

Josh and Phil also introduced Jacobs to the sport of Ultimate Frisbee, the sport based on the flying disc with roots in New Haven. The brothers were so into Frisbee that they named their business after Ashley Whippet, the dog that launched himself to fame by breaking onto the field with his owner during a game at Dodger Stadium and awing the crowd with his disc-catching abilities.

In Chicago, Jacobs still plays Ultimate, even though his dad makes fun of him for running around after a flying disc at the ripe age of 49.

After high school, Jacobs went off to college at Boston University. He studied history and struck upon the product that he could build a business around — the bagel. This was in the early ​‘80s, before there was a Bruegger’s or Dunkin Donuts on every corner, when the bagel was still a relative novelty, Jacobs said.

Like the Karlin brothers, and his great-uncles before him, Jacobs decided he wanted to go into business with his family. He called up his brothers Peter and Andrew and began discussing his bagel idea. When Bill graduated college in 1983, he and Peter and Andy moved to Chicago, where Andy had friends.

None of the three brothers had any business experience to speak of. They did have $180,000 from a mortgage their mom and dad took out on their house in Westville. With that money, they established a bagel shop, Jacobs Bros. Bagels.

One shop soon led to four shops, and the brothers started to diversify. When Starbucks came to town, they began roasting their own coffee. When the market filled up with other bagel companies, they took on Bruegger’s franchises. By 1999, right before they sold the business, they had eight Jacobs Bros. bagel shops and 10 Bruegger’s outlets.

Peter then went into the non-profit world. Andy went into real estate. Bill started plotting his next food venture — apizza.

“The idea was always in my head,” Jacobs said. Just as he had found a fresh market in Chicago for the bagel, Bill suspected the city was ready for a new kind of pizza.

Deep dish is fine, Jacobs said. ​“It’s just a different animal.” The pizza is so dense, you can have deep-dish maybe once or twice a month at most, he said. ​“One slice and you’re toast. You really can’t eat a lot of it.”

New Haven’s apizza, on the other hand, is a more delicate and subtle pie, which can be enjoyed several times a week, Jacobs said.

While Jacob’s apizza idea was percolating, a brewer friend of his approached him after an Ultimate game. The brewer, Matt Brynildson, handed Jacobs a witbier of his own creation and told Jacobs that if he ever wanted to go into business together, he was ready.

The beer was delicious.

“We can do this,” Jacobs remembered thinking.

The brewmaster position at Piece is now occupied by Jonathan Cutler, who took over at Brynildson’s recommendation.

Jacobs wrote a business plan for a brewery and New Haven-style pizzeria and started looking for investors. It proved to be a tough sell. ​“They thought I was crazy,” Jacobs said. No one had heard of New Haven-style pizza. ​“I had to explain it to them.”

He could have simply called it ​“thin-crust pizza” in his business plan and gotten his idea across. Jacobs said it was important to him to give credit where it was due, and to spread the reputation of the pizza he grew up eating on Wooster Street.

I Want You To Back Me

As before, a business breakthrough came by way of Ultimate Frisbee. After a game, Jacobs announced to his teammates that he was looking for investors interested in helping to bankroll a new restaurant. One player spoke up to say she knew a family with some money in Rockford, a couple hours west of Chicago. That tip led Jacobs to Rick Nielsen, the guitarist for rock band Cheap Trick (of ​“I Want You To Want Me” fame).

Jacobs told Nielsen his idea for a brewery and pizzeria. He showed Nielsen the spot he’d found in the then undiscovered Chicago neighborhood of Wicker Park: a garage with a dirt floor used by a roofing company. Jacobs convinced Nielsen of the spot’s potential, pointing out the glass windows that form the peak of the vaulted roof, held up by old rough-hewn lumber.

Nielsen got on board. He ended up becoming an enduring supporter of Piece, eventually donating his original signature five-neck guitar to hang on the wall.

Jacobs opened Piece on July 27, 2001. He dedicated the restaurant to the memory of Sally’s founder Sal Consiglio and to his widow Flo Consiglio.

Shortly after opening, Jacobs hit upon another stroke of luck — MTV came to town.

In the summer of 2001, the cable network began filming the Chicago season of its seminal reality show, the Real World. It installed a group of exhibitionist twentysomethings in a building within a block of Piece. Two of them, Cara Kahn and Tonya Cooley, walked in one day, trailed by cameras, to apply to wait tables at Piece.

Jacobs, recognizing the opportunity immediately, hired Kahn and Cooley. Pretty soon, camera crews were trailing his new waitresses all around his restaurant, bringing the eyes of the world to his brand new pizzeria.

“The place garnered a lot of publicity,” he said. ​“We were always in the paper.”

The instant scrutiny proved to be ​“a double edged sword,” Jacobs said. ​“We weren’t able to have a soft opening.” Piece was thrust into the limelight while Jacobs was still trying to ​“iron out the product and the service,” he said. ​“It was rocky from the beginning.”

Sally’s To The Rescue

Luckily, Jacobs had help from his hometown.

Shortly before opening, he called up his high school buddy, Ray Peck.

“He was cooking pies over at Sally’s,” Jacobs said. Peck was looking for something new to do. Jacobs convinced him to come out to Chicago for six months. Peck helped Jacobs set up the kitchen (pictured) and establish apizza in the land of the deep dish.

With the kinks straightened out, business took off at Piece.Two years ago Jacobs expanded into the storefront next door, where he put in another kitchen for delivery service.

The success hasn’t been all because of apizza, Jacobs stressed. The restaurant also serves as neighborhood bar, and shows all the Cubs and White Sox games on its many flat screen TVs. On Saturdays there’s a live band doing karaoke.

Customers also pile in for Piece’s award winning beers. The restaurant’s brewed-on-site beer has won 19 medals since 2002, proudly listed on a chalkboard in the bar (pictured below). ​“Beer has been a big part of our success,” he said.

“It’s fantastic,” he said. ​“I’ve been very, very, very fortunate.”