Justice Scalia Doesn’t Think Deep Dish Pizza is Pizza – Do You? [POLL]

Justice Antonin Scalia has a problem with deep dish pizza. He doesn’t consider it pizza.
And as far as I’m concerned he’s right.

Being somewhat of a traditionalist, I view pizza as the simple pie that came to our shores with the first wave of Southern Italian immigrants.

Naturally, things morph, as did the venerable pizza of yore – yet, it’s hard to look upon pizza – especially the deep dish variety favored by Chicago natives – as just that.

Thin crusted, with just a hint of tomato, buffalo mozzarella, oil, perhaps a sprinkle of oregano, and baked in a coal-fired brick oven are all the ingredients for the perfect pie.
(I’ll also make an exception for some good Sicilian – which is pan baked!)

But when it comes to the deep-dish variety of which the good Justice speaks – he has a point. It’s more like eating a lasagna than pizza.

According to this:

Objection, your honor!

A city pizzeria owner has thrown down a deep dish taunt to blowhard Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia: Put your mouth where my pizza is.

One day after the Queens-raised Scalia famously dissed an entire region of the nation by decrying Chicago-style pizza as “not pizza,” a fired-up Emmett Burke defended the 2-inch thick pies he churns out at his pie shop, Emmett’s.

“New Yorkers have the inferiority complex because the Chicago pizza is getting strong,” says Burke, a Midwestern transplant who opened his MacDougal St. eatery late last year to far better reviews than the one rendered by the High Court’s bombastic jurist.

Burke is so convinced his Chicago-style deep dish is superior that he’s willing to double down on his challenge to Scalia — by asking the Chief Justice of the Supreme Pizza Court of the United States to issue the final ruling: “Scalia can bring in his favorite New York pizza and we’ll bring ours — and we can have Jon Stewart taste it,” Emmett says.

Neither Scalia nor Stewart responded to the restaurateur’s challenge, but we know where Stewart stands on thick-crust pizza in general.

“It’s a f--king casserole,” he once quipped, likening the pride of the Windy City to “tomato sauce in a bread bowl.”

But that was nothing compared to the bias shown by Scalia, who said last week that Chicago pizza is “very tasty, but ... it shouldn’t be called ‘pizza.’”

As Burke might say, eat it.

“Some people don’t want to call it pizza, but that’s because they may be jealous,” he says, then added his own taunt of the cranky conservative.

“I don’t see a section on his Wikipedia page about his pizza prowess,” says Burke.

Many former residents of the Garden State will tell us that once they leave, the thing they miss the most is the pizza. Nowhere else in the country is the pizza the same as it is here – unless you’re from New York and consider yourself a pizza snob.

But do you consider Chicago style deep dish pizza a “casserole” as Justice Scalia calls it, or is it real pizza in your mind? And how do you like your pizza?