We knew the winnner before the votes were counted. At Giordano's restaurant it was unanimous love at first taste. It's pizza was so delicious that we applauded the chef, Efren Boglio. He told us this story:

"My brother Joseph and I both own and cook for Giordano's. We were born in a small northern Italian town near Torino, where our mother was known for her exquisite dishes. Of all her repertoire, though, my family was most fond of her deep-dish, double-crusted pizza, which she made on Easter and stuffed with ricotta cheese.

I loved her pizza so much that when I came to America in 1967 I took a job at a pizza restaurant, pleased to be near my favorite food. but the pizza there was only fair-not nearly as good as Mother's. And, as time passed, I tasted pizzas at other restaurants, I was surprised to find that the very best around didn't approach the worst of those I'd eaten back home in the old country.

So I opened my own pizza restaurant. It was called Roma and was doing all right. But then my brother Joseph came to Chicago, and we decided to close Roma and open a restaurant specializing in Mothers's

pizza-one which would be called by her name, Giordano. We worked for months, trying to develop a superlative Chicago variation of Mother's pizza; then, in February 1974, we opened Giordano's.

Don't get the idea that we're satisfied, though. We're not. We alter our pizzas as time passes, as the necessity arises. Our first pizzas, for example, had just the right amount of garlic for us, but too much for most of our customers; so we cut down some of it. But besides surveying our customers constantly, Joseph and I go once a week, to different pizza restaurants, in order to taste the competition.

The thing about pizza is that like everything good, it has to have an evolution. To stay the same means to go backward. It wasn't my mother or my brother and myself who invented the pizza we serve here. The recipe probably began with our great, great, great, great, great-grandmother. You ask how long it took to develop the recipe. I'd have to say 200 to 300 years. And it's still developing."

Excerpted from Chicago Magazine.
© 2005 Giordano's Enterprises, Inc.