Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Tall Midget wrote:
Did Great Lakes Pizza "fail"? The place was enormously popular. People lined up around the block for that pizza. My understanding was that it closed because the owners got tired of running it.
It was popular for a quick minute. People went there once and then got tired of that asshole's shtick. He couldn't sell his shitty fucking attitude. His product wasn't the problem. He made a good pizza. But it takes something much more special than what he had to get away with a "Go fuck yourself if you don't like it" customer service policy.
My recollection is that the place was incredibly popular until the day it closed. According to the
Tribune, Great Lakes closed both due to owner burnout and a lease dispute:
The Chicago Tribune wrote:
But Great Lake made the finest pizza in America, according to The New York Times, GQ, Playboy and more authoritative eaters than can be mentioned here. Its crust was chewy, blackened and perfect; its ingredients came from whatever Lessins and Esparza could round up from a local farmers market that day. Other pizza places claim similar qualities, but few (certainly none I have ever tasted before or since) could balance a love of classic pizza with swoon-inducing flavors so well: sweet corn in summer, charred squash in autumn.
The catch, the deal with the devil, was the place itself, and its hard-to-warm-to owners who so valued their freedom and standards that they proved unpredictable, feisty, harsh. They were often called Pizza Nazis. They stayed open fewer hours than popularity warranted; it wasn't uncommon to go on a Saturday and find they were randomly closed. And theirs was not a manufactured popularity: They made once-in-a-lifetime food and refused to bend, speed up because lines had grown, add more tables or give preferential treatment. When they asked Jay Z and Beyonce to wait an hour for a table on a weekday, you knew they were serious.
But eventually a reputation precedes you. Lessins and Esparza could not come to lease-renewal terms with their landlord. Exhausted from daily bouts of combat, they decided to lock up and stop. Like all bottle rockets, Great Lake's run was spectacular, short (five years) and inevitable. You can only say, “Sorry, we've run out of dough,” so many times before you're not long for this world.
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Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.