Restaurant Review – Joey D’s – Venice

Chicago Style Eatery and Pizzeria

My wife and I were in Venice visiting my brother and we decided to go to this Chicago sports bar / pizzeria to get some deep dish pizza. We’re all from Chicago originally and have eaten a lot of deep dish pizza in our time, so we were going to see how this stacked up. Long story short, pretty good!

There was lots of Chicago sports paraphernalia around. Cubs, Sox, Bulls, Hawks and, of course, da Bears! I bet it gets pretty crowded on game days even though its been 38 years since Super Bowl 20 in 1985! It had been 107 years for the Cubs to win a World Series several years ago, so Chicago sports fans have learned how to party and have a good time without all that useless championship stuff going on! Those 90 Bulls did spoil us though!

Anyway, let’s get to the food. We ordered salads to start. They were big and 2 salads were plenty to split among four people. The onion rings arrived. They were obviously a frozen product because they weren’t onion rings at all, they were like pringle onion rings. Perfect round rings of breaded, chopped up onion. So there’s no biting into the onion ring and accidentally pulling out the whole piece of onion because there isn’t a whole piece of onion! I wonder what the machine looks like that makes those onion rings? And the dipping sauce had horseradish in it and it was heavy on the horseradish. I had to add ketchup to tone it down.

The pizza arrived and it was good. But you know what? It was even better the next day cold! The red sauce had chunks of tomato in it. It was like they added a can of diced tomatoes to the can of pizza sauce to give it a kind of homemade feeling I guess, but they missed the mark. When I ate the pizza cold I ended up scrapping a lot of the sauce off. But it was good! The crust was really good. We ended up eating every last bit of that pizza!

So, what’s the bottom line? If I was wanting to go out and see some Chicago sports with a group of friends, this would be the place to do it! Just get something else besides the onion rings! Here’s a link to their website.