Short answer
- Pequod's and Art of Pizza, the two the internet crowns hardest, do not use the words deep dish on their menus. Pequod's sells "Pan Pizza". Art of Pizza sells "PAN" and "STUFFED".
- Lou Malnati's and Giordano's publish no price anywhere. They are the two in Google's own featured question, and neither will tell you what a pizza costs without starting an order.
- Giordano's on Randolph is 640 m from Millennium Park, 7.7 minutes' walk. It is the only one of the five that is genuinely central.
- Pequod's is 77 minutes on foot and Art of Pizza 96. That is a bus or a cab, not a stroll, and no guide we read says so.
- Nobody publishes a bake time. Not one of the five. The forty-five minutes every guide repeats is not sourced from any restaurant.
01The short version
If you have one evening and you are staying downtown, go to Giordano's on East Randolph, because it is 640 metres from the Bean and the alternatives are twenty minutes away in the good case and an hour and a half in the bad one. It sells a stuffed pizza rather than a classic deep dish, and its own menu says so, which is more honesty than most of this category manages.
If what you want is specifically the thing purists mean by deep dish, Gino's East and Lou Malnati's both call it that on their own menus, and they sit 1692 and 1693 metres from Millennium Park respectively, in opposite directions. Those two numbers are one metre apart and we did not arrange that.
And if you are eating alone or you have forty minutes rather than two hours, the answer is a slice at Art of Pizza for $6.32, which is the only place of the five that sells one, and you should know before you set off that it is in Lakeview.
03What each one costs, where anyone says
Three of the five publish a full price list. Two publish nothing at all, and they are, inevitably, Lou Malnati's and Giordano's, the two names in the question Google puts at the top of this search.
Lou Malnati's menu page lists every pizza it makes and not one figure. To see a price you have to open the ordering site, which asks for an address before it will show you anything. Giordano's national menu lists the dishes and shows no prices until you select a specific restaurant. Neither is doing anything unusual for a chain. It is still the case that you cannot answer "what does this cost" without committing to an order.
Cheese pizza, from each restaurant's own menu
| Restaurant | Cheese pizza | Per person | What the menu adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lou Malnati's, River North | Not published | Not stated | No price anywhere on the site. You have to start an order. |
| Gino's East, Magnificent Mile | Small $23.12 | $7.71 to $11.56 | Cheese, build your own. Topped ones run $28.99 to $32.34. |
| Giordano's, Randolph St | Not published | Not stated | No price until you pick a store. The national menu lists dishes with no figures. |
| Pequod's, Lincoln Park | Personal 7" $11.75 · Small 10" $17.35 · Medium 12" $22.95 · Large 14" $27.80 | Not stated | Cheese only. Its menu has no deep dish section at all. |
| Art of Pizza, Lakeview | Stuffed 10" $17.75 · Stuffed 12" $22.25 · Stuffed 14" $26.25 · By the slice $6.32 | Not stated | The only one of the five that sells it by the slice. |
Read on 23 September 2026 from each restaurant's own ordering menu: Gino's East from the Superior Street location, Pequod's from the Chicago location, Art of Pizza from its published price list. Prices are for a plain cheese pizza, carryout, before tax and tip. The two highlighted rows publish no price we could read.
The per-person column is almost empty and that is deliberate. Only Gino's East publishes how many people a pizza feeds, stating small serves two to three, medium three to four and large four to five. That makes its $23.12 small work out at $7.71 to $11.56 a head. For everyone else we have inches and nothing more, and dividing a price by a diameter to invent a head count would be making it up.
The one genuine bargain on the table is the $6.32 slice at Art of Pizza, which is the only slice in the group. If you are one person, every other option here starts at seventeen dollars and change.
04The famous ones are not where you are
Here is the fact that none of the guides we read mentions once. The two places the internet crowns, Pequod's with its Yelp number one and Art of Pizza with its Tribune award, are 6.5 and 8.0 kilometres from Millennium Park. That is 77 and 96 minutes on foot.
How far each one is, and what that means in practice
| Restaurant | Walk | By car | Address |
|---|---|---|---|
| Giordano's | 640 m · 8 min | 3 min | 130 E Randolph St |
| Gino's East | 1692 m · 20 min | 6 min | 162 E Superior St |
| Lou Malnati's | 1693 m · 20 min | 5 min | 439 N Wells St |
| Pequod's | 6453 m · 77 min | 13 min | 2207 N Clybourn Ave |
| Art of Pizza | 8019 m · 96 min | 16 min | 3033 N Ashland Ave |
Routed with OpenRouteService on OpenStreetMap data from Millennium Park on 23 September 2026. Driving times are free-flow estimates and take no account of Chicago traffic or of parking, which near Clybourn on a Friday night is its own adventure.
We are not telling you to skip Pequod's. We are telling you that it is a separate outing rather than something you drop into between the river cruise and the observation deck, and that the difference between 7.7 minutes and 77 minutes is the difference between a decision and an evening. If your trip is tight, our three-day itinerary already shows that day one does not fit without adding a cross-town dinner to it.
Note also that the two closest to the centre keep the shortest hours. Giordano's on Randolph opens at 10:30 and Gino's East at 11:00, while Pequod's serves until two in the morning six nights a week. The late option and the central option are not the same restaurant.
05The bake time nobody publishes
Every guide to Chicago deep dish tells you to allow forty-five minutes for it to bake. We went looking for the source of that number and there is not one. None of the five restaurants publishes a bake time anywhere on its website. Not on the menus, not on the FAQ pages, not on the reservation pages. We checked all five.
This is where a guide normally writes "expect about 45 minutes" and moves on, and the figure quietly becomes a fact by repetition. Serious Eats and Block Club Chicago both mention forty to fifty minutes in passing, in prose, without sourcing it to an operator. We are not going to launder that into a number with our name on it. Assume it is slow, order as soon as you sit down, and treat any specific figure you read as folklore until a restaurant prints it.
What restaurants do publish is how to work around the wait, and it is worth reading because they contradict each other. Gino's East states that in Chicago only its Magnificent Mile location takes reservations and that the South Loop one does not, which is a real trap if you book the wrong branch in your head. Pequod's tells you to reserve online to cut the wait and sends waiting groups to the bar next door. Art of Pizza shuts its dining room thirty minutes before it stops serving.
06Is a pizza tour worth it
There are two pizza tours in Chicago and they are run by the same company, Chicago Pizza Tour, which we read from the product record rather than from the titles. Before anything else, the thing that decides whether they are for you: neither one goes to any of the five restaurants on this page.
In both, deep dish is one style out of four. The walking tour sets two American pizzas against two Italian ones, deep dish alongside Roman, Neapolitan and artisanal, and the pizzerias it names in its own photographs are Bar Cargo, Eataly, Robert's and Dough Bros. The coach tour includes four slices and the venues in its photographs are Pizano's in the Loop, Coalfire, Macello and Flo & Santo's. Good places, all of them. None of them is Lou Malnati's, Giordano's or Gino's East.
So these are not a shortcut to the famous pie, and anyone selling them to you as one is not reading the operator's own description. What they are is the answer to a different question: what Chicago pizza is as a category, with someone explaining why the crusts differ, and in the coach's case transport to neighbourhoods that section 04 just showed are 77 to 96 minutes away on foot.
The two tours against going yourself
| Coach tour | Walking tour | On your own | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price per person | $89 | $69 | $7.71 to $11.56 sharing a small at Gino's East, or $6.32 for a slice |
| Time | 3.5 hours | 2 to 3 hours | As long as the bake takes, which nobody publishes |
| What you get | Four slices, a guide and a bus | Four styles, a guide, lunch included | One pizza, chosen by you |
| Rating | 4.89 from 484 reviews | 4.97 from 128 reviews | Not applicable |
| Cancels for bad weather | No | Yes | Not applicable |
| Cancels if too few people book | No | Yes | Not applicable |
| Goes to the five on this page | No | No | Yes, that is the point |
Tour figures read from the Viator API on 23 September 2026, including the operator, the inclusions and the cancellation terms. The two cancellation rows are the real difference between them and neither operator puts them next to the price: the walking tour refunds you if the weather turns or if not enough people book, and the coach tour does neither. The per-person column on the right is calculated only from Gino's East, because it is the one restaurant that publishes how many its pizzas feed.
On the ratings, apply the same rule this site applies everywhere else. The walking tour's 4.97 is the higher score and it rests on 128 reviews; the coach's 4.89 rests on 484. The second is the weaker number and the stronger evidence.
Both pizza tours, with what each one is for
The one that leaves downtown
Chicago Pizza Tour by coach, 3.5 hours
4.89 · 484 reviews
Starts and ends on East Madison in the Loop and takes a bus into the neighbourhoods, which is the only product we found that answers the distance problem this page measured. Four slices and a guide included. Four hundred and eighty-four reviews at 4.89 is the better evidence of the two. It does not cancel for bad weather or for too few travellers, which its walking sibling does.
Highest rated, thinnest evidence
Downtown walking pizza tour, 2 to 3 hours
4.97 · 128 reviews
On foot from River East Plaza to River North, comparing two American pizzas with two Italian ones, lunch included and capped at sixteen people. The 4.97 is the best score anywhere on this site and it rests on 128 reviews, so read it beside the coach tour rather than above it. Cancels for bad weather and for insufficient numbers.
07So which one
We have not eaten at these five, and this page has been careful not to pretend otherwise. What it can do is turn the decision into the three questions that actually have answers.
Pick by the constraint you actually have
| If this is your situation | Go here | Because |
|---|---|---|
| One evening, staying downtown | Giordano's, 130 E Randolph St | 640 m from Millennium Park against 1.7 km for the next nearest. It is stuffed rather than deep dish and its menu says so. |
| You want actual deep dish, by its own name | Gino's East or Lou Malnati's | Both label it deep dish on their own menus, and both are about 20 minutes' walk out. Gino's is the one of the two that will tell you the price. |
| Eating alone, or short on time | Art of Pizza, by the slice | $6.32 for a slice is the only sub-ten-dollar way into this category. The cost is the trip: 8.0 km out. |
| You want the one the internet votes for | Pequod's, Lincoln Park | The caramelised rim is genuinely its own thing. Know that its menu calls it pan pizza and that it is 77 minutes on foot. |
| You are out late | Pequod's | Serves until 02:00 Monday to Saturday. The central two shut hours earlier. |
Built from the measurements in the tables above, all read on 23 September 2026. No restaurant on this page has paid to be here and there are no affiliate links in this section, because none of these five sells through one.
08Questions people actually ask
What is the best deep dish pizza in Chicago?
There is no single answer and anyone giving you one confidently is picking a favourite, not measuring anything. What we can tell you is what each one charges, how far it is and what its own menu calls it. If you want the thing the purists mean by deep dish and you want it near the Loop, Gino's East and Lou Malnati's both call their pizza deep dish on their own menus and both sit about twenty minutes' walk from Millennium Park. If you want the pizza that wins the internet polls, that is Pequod's, and its menu does not use the words deep dish anywhere.
What's better, Lou Malnati's or Giordano's?
They are not the same product, which is the part the question hides. Lou Malnati's menu category is Deep Dish Pizzas and its crust is what it calls Buttercrust. Giordano's category is Stuffed Deep Dish, and it describes a flaky buttery double crust, meaning there is a second layer of dough over the filling. So you are choosing between a deep dish and a stuffed pizza with a lid. Neither publishes a price you can check: Lou Malnati's has no figure anywhere on its site and Giordano's shows none until you pick a specific store.
How much does deep dish pizza cost in Chicago?
Between about $18 and $28 for a cheese pizza big enough for two or three, from the three places that publish prices. Gino's East asks $23.12 for a small cheese deep dish and is the only one that states how many it feeds, two to three people, which works out at $7.71 to $11.56 a head. Pequod's runs $11.75 for a 7-inch up to $27.8 for a 14-inch. Art of Pizza charges $17.75 for a 10-inch stuffed. Lou Malnati's and Giordano's publish nothing.
Is Pequod's actually deep dish?
Not according to Pequod's. Its homepage is titled "Best Deep Dish Pizza in Chicago (#1 by Yelp)" and its menu has exactly two pizza sections, Thin Crust Pizza and Pan Pizza. The words deep dish do not appear on the menu at all. This is not us splitting hairs: the restaurant markets itself with one word and sells you another. What it actually makes is a pan pizza with cheese taken up the side of the tin so it caramelises against the metal, which is its own thing and worth eating, just not the thing the word promises.
How long does deep dish pizza take to bake?
Nobody official will tell you. Guides repeat forty-five minutes, and Serious Eats and Block Club Chicago both mention figures in the forty to fifty minute range in passing, but we checked the menus, FAQ pages and reservation pages of all five restaurants on this page and not one of them publishes a bake time. We are not going to copy a number out of another guide and present it as checked. Assume it is not fast, order the moment you sit down, and if you are on a schedule ring ahead.
Where is the best deep dish pizza near Millennium Park?
Giordano's on East Randolph, 640 metres away, which is 7.7 minutes on foot. It is by some distance the closest of the five and the only one you can reach on a lunch break from the Bean. Gino's East on the Magnificent Mile and Lou Malnati's in River North are both about 20 minutes' walk in opposite directions.
Can you get deep dish pizza by the slice in Chicago?
At Art of Pizza, yes, at $6.32 a slice, and it is the only one of the five that does it. That matters more than it sounds: everywhere else the smallest unit is a whole pizza, so a solo traveller is choosing between $18 and $28 of pizza and a long wait. The catch is the address. Art of Pizza is on North Ashland in Lakeview, 8.0 km from Millennium Park, which is 16 minutes by car and 96 on foot.
Is a Chicago pizza tour worth it?
It depends on what you think you are buying, and one fact decides it: neither of the two pizza tours goes to any of the five restaurants on this page. Both are run by the same company, Chicago Pizza Tour, and in both deep dish is one style out of four. The venues they name in their own descriptions and photographs are Bar Cargo, Eataly, Robert's and Dough Bros on the walking tour, and Pizano's, Coalfire, Macello and Flo & Santo's on the coach. So a tour is not a shortcut to Lou Malnati's. At $89 and $69 against roughly $7.71 to $11.56 a head for sharing a pizza yourself, you are paying six to ten times the food cost for a guide, four styles and, on the coach, transport to neighbourhoods that are an hour's walk out.
Do I need a reservation for deep dish in Chicago?
It depends which door you walk through, and one chain contradicts itself by branch. Gino's East states on its own FAQ that in Chicago only the Magnificent Mile location takes reservations and that the South Loop one does not. Pequod's tells you to book online to cut the wait and points groups at the bar next door while they queue. Art of Pizza closes its dining room half an hour before the kitchen stops, so a late table is not the same as a late order.
Diego FresnoI was in Chicago in July 2025 and I did eat deep dish, once, which is exactly the amount of experience that does not qualify anyone to rank five restaurants. So this page does not rank them on taste. What it does is the work the big guides skipped: opening five menus, writing down what each one charges and what each one calls its own pizza, and routing the walk from Millennium Park to each front door. The two findings that came out of it, that two of them never say deep dish and that the two most famous publish no price, were not what I went looking for.
Menu categories, prices, opening hours and reservation policies read from each restaurant's own website on 23 September 2026: loumalnatis.com, order.ginoseast.com for the Superior Street location, orders.giordanos.com, pequodspizza.com for the Chicago location, and artofpizzachicago.com. Walking and driving times routed with OpenRouteService on OpenStreetMap data from Millennium Park. Lou Malnati's coordinates come from the map links on its own locations page; the rest were geocoded and checked against the published address. NOT verified: any bake or wait time, because no operator publishes one, and the taste of any of these pizzas. Prices are carryout, before tax and tip, and they move.