It's not that they crave the original specialties. They're not unique at all and you can still get them at Hot "G", made by the same fucking dudes that made them at Hot Doug's with the same products they used over there. People crave interaction with this goofy motherfucker. I'm not really sure why. He's about as sincere as Bill Murray's lounge singer. It's truly a cult of personality.

He's a sharp marketeer, I'll give him that much. His business model worked for him. The line that I refused to stand in was part of the mystique. The Fatso's guys opened a place in Doug's space with a product that was as good or better and they couldn't make it there. Doug's existed for the convenience and glorification of Doug, not to actually serve customers. I don't patronize places like that. But I do respect Doug for pulling it off. Most people can't get away with it. Many have tried and they often had better and more unique products than Doug ever did. It takes a certain personality.

Back in November Mike Sula wrote a review of Cantina 1910 (great place and the owner/chef is a cute chick who is super cool and says "fuck" a lot) wherein he suggested that Andersonville would not support a certain high level of dining and he cited Pasticceria Natalina and Great Lakes Pizza as examples of places that failed. I felt compelled to write to him and point out that Natalie Zarzour of Natalina and the douchebag that ran Great Lakes tried to do that thing where they run a restaurant on their own terms and fuck you if you don't like it. That's great if you can get away with it. But it takes a certain type of person, e.g. the obsequious phony Doug or the crusty but lovable Burt of Burt's Pizza. (And some LTH hype doesn't hurt either.) Natalie is a goof and the Great Lakes guy is possibly the biggest Caller Bob I've ever met in my life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

This guy retires worse than Panther.

I rarely troll.

I rarely troll.

P.S. way to not toss a bone to the guys at Pork Shoppe, who actually fabricated all your sausages, and have a new location I'm sure could use some press.

Trae Young will be a bust. Book It!