My Pi, the Aronson family’s beloved Chicago deep-dish pizza brand founded in 1971, once boasted more than two dozen locations in nine states. It will soon be down to zero with the closure of its last store at the end of June.
It’s a disheartening reversal of fortune for what was considered an iconic pizza company in the Windy City—and, according to its owners, the first deep-dish brand to expand outside of Illinois. My Pi regularly made the city’s best-pizzeria lists for decades and earned similar acclaim in other states.
Via social media, current owner Richard Aronson announced last week that he would shut down the sole remaining My Pi store on North Damen Avenue after “54 unforgettable years.”
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“From our first location on Sheridan Road in 1971 to our Bucktown home since 2000, My Pi has been a labor of love,” he wrote on Instagram. “We introduced deep-dish beyond Illinois, opened 25 locations across nine states, and shared our family recipe with generations of pizza lovers. We’ve been honored to be part of your celebrations, your cravings, your late nights, and your family dinners. Your support means the world to us.”
Richard’s dad, Larry, launched and grew the brand during the 1970s, bringing My Pi to Miami Beach, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, St. Paul and other cities around the country—even Long Island, New York. But he eventually started closing stores down as their leases expired, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. With the exception of the Bucktown location, Larry had “retired” his last restaurant in Lincoln Park as of 2008.
During the pandemic, the Bucktown restaurant managed to thrive, thanks to being largely a DELCO operation and shipping its frozen pizzas nationwide. “Shipping picked up 400%, so that got us through COVID,” Richard Aronson told the Sun-Times.
When demand for dine-in climbed again after the pandemic, however, business went downhill for My Pi, due in part to “a tremendous amount of competition just four blocks away,” Aronson said. “That started appearing with that renaissance of pizza. So where there used to be zero pizzerias, there became 12 pizzerias, and that’s one of our main markets.”
A troubled economy has made Aronson reluctant to convert the Bucktown restaurant—which only has a few tables and chairs—from mostly DELCO to dine-in. “In this case, we don’t have the ability to wait it out for as long as it might have to be,” Aronson told the Sun-Times. “Even if I could raise the funds, it becomes a crazy idea to spend all that amount hoping that, when you open the dining room, the general economy isn’t getting crushed like [what] I lived through in the Great Recession.”
Aronson added a poignant note in a separate interview with Eater Chicago. “It’s also that I’m just getting old,” he said. “I’ve been cooking for 44 years.”
He also lamented the evolution of Chicago’s popular deep-dish style. “I just feel bad that the more balanced kind of tuxedo version of the deep dish—which is perfectly balanced and never goes out of style, like a tuxedo—is kind of going away because people don’t realize that they’re different, unfortunately,” he said in the Chicago Eater interview. “That makes me sad.”
