Burt's Place Creates Pizza Harmony as Restaurant's Fame Spreads

In keeping with the deep dish of character that envelops , the proprietor sat down at a back booth, answered his 1950s-vintage white rotary phone, and took a call from Toronto inquiring if they could order a pizza for…January.

That might have been a record advance-request for Burt Katz.

Katz, 74, is firm on calling ahead, preferably the previous day, for seating and on orders for his trademark pan pizza with 13 available ingredients – but not anchovies, chicken, pineapple or other new-age stuff. Yet the distinctive chef with the long white beard that would qualify him for holy-man status in several religions doesn’t go to the extreme of reservations four months ahead of time. Call back a little while before you fly into Chicago, the Canadian was informed, and we’ve got a custom-ordered pizza and table for you.

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The word’s spread worldwide about Burt’s Place, its one-of-a-kind pizza recipe by the picky proprietor and his anti-restaurant style of doing business. After hosting diners from Malaysia, Guam, Saipan, Brazil and all over the globe, 40-year pizza veteran Katz recently has gotten props as the main story in the Chicago Tribune’s Thursday dining section, a front-and-center place on a WGN-TV dining show and other broadcast publicity.

Vintage knick-knacks provide unusual decor

Katz’s profile may be higher than ever in the 22 years he’s operated in his 12-table diner at 8541 N. Ferris Ave. The joint is outfitted in dark-paneled Wisconsin supper-club style with vintage knick-knacks such as 1920’s radio microphones and a 1949 TV set festooned in every available space. But his pizza recipe is firm.

Katz has perfected the “balance” of mixing ingredients, cheese, tomatoes and crust to the way he likes it, and that’s that. Along with taking orders by hand on the rotary phone with nary a computer or credit-card machine in sight.

“It’s pure Darwinism,” Katz said of his recipe. “It’s evolution. You try it, tweak it, try it until you reach the point you want to be with your product. Then you stop. I’ve stopped. I’m where I want to be with my product and my business.”

The pizza is the thing at Burt’s. A sampling featuring mushrooms, onions, green peppers and pepperoni backed up the “balance” dictum.

Every ingredient seemed tied together and complementary. None is dominating like so many other pan pizzas where the cheese is laid on thick to stretch like out-of-control gum or the crust thrusts up like jagged shoreline rocks. The diner has to aggressively tear ingredients from their moorings in the mix to separate them from their rightful places. They won’t slide off their base, leaving the crust to fend for itself. The slice stays together from start to finish as a unified palate-pleaser.

Ingredients don’t dominate each other

“It’s the balance, the way you put them on,” Katz said. “One (ingredient) doesn’t overwhelm the other. You do it to where you get it where you want it. It’s basically eyeballing and after many years, you know.”

Surest way to agitate Katz is to compare him with other pizza-makers. He’s like a ballplayer asked about other teams’ position in the pennant race. He’ll say he takes care of his own business, period.

Obviously, his pizza constitution is the No. 1 seller. Katz relies on taste-tests passed, then spread by word-of-mouth to snare in more customers. He does not advertise. But the recent torrent of publicity hasn’t hurt.

Eating a cheese pizza in his 1-800-Got-Junk truck outside Burt’s during the lunch hour, Brandon Zyzda said he saw the place on TV recently.

“It’s my first time,” Zyzda said. “It felt like the Soup Nazi (Burt’s personality). I like the ingredients.”

Burt’s latest line of pizza parlors

Making pizzas was a learned craft for longtime Skokie resident Katz, assisted in the eatery only by Sharon Katz, to whom he has been married for 49 years. He first noticed pizza visiting Italian neighborhoods on the West Side when he was young, the then-exotic dish just a seeming topping for focaccia bread. By 1971, the last time he applied a razor to his face, at a time when pan or deep-dish pizza started to creep into diners’ consciousness, he started his run. It was at the point when he founded the original Pequod in Morton Grove and Gulliver’s on Howard Street in Chicago. He also owned The Inferno in Evanston.

But no restaurant operates like Burt’s, taking orders only in advance. That’s not an eccentric style, he said. It’s pure efficiency for both a place with two employees and diners who need not wait for orders.

“It’s a small store and we don’t seat many people,” Katz said. “Convenience and necessity where the person calls for a specific time and day. When they come in, their food is on the table at the designated time. The seating is available. It helps us organize our kitchen and our floor plan."

“On the customer’s side, we get a lot of families. They go in (to another restaurant) with kids, the kids are bouncing off the walls (waiting for the order), the parents are going nuts and the people sitting at the next table are ready to walk. They call, we ask them to come in 10 minutes before and the kids don’t go crazy because their food is there.”

And that system will continue because Katz loves his work, loves the art of the pizza. He has no plans to retire. Instead, he plans to keep moving himself and move those pizzas into satisfied customers. But call ahead first.

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