10420 Portage RoadI love it when new pizza joints open. I’m always looking for something new.
There are some really great pizza places in the Kalamazoo area but J spoiled me on pizza when we started dating. She grew up in the Chicago suburbs and one of the first time I stayed at her parents house, she was super excited to get pizza from the place her family always ordered from in Oak Lawn.
I took one bite of thin & crispy Italian beef pizza from Palermo’s 95th and I was never the same. It was life altering. Even growing up near the city, I always thought of Chicago style pizza as Deep Dish. I had never had the Tavern Style pizza before and now it’s all I want.
The point of that story is to say, I’m pretty hard on pizza. I love pizza. I’ll eat it for every meal but ever single pizza I eat is compared to Palermo’s….whether it’s the same style or not.
Portage used to have a Chicago style pizza place aptly named Chicago Style Pizza. We ordered from there a couple of times but it really never did much for us. It was fine and it was something different but it wasn’t the Chicago style pizza we liked.
That restaurant closed a few years ago and it didn’t really make much of an impact on us but I know people in the area loved that place and it was a hard hit to take. It’s always a bummer when you lose the pizza you grew up with.
The building didn’t stay empty long though.
Late last year, the Kalako Street Cuisine food truck moved in to the small building near the corner of Portage Road and Osterhout Avenue on the far south side of Portage. The business has been Chicago Style Pizza for almost 45 years and was a staple in the childhood of Kalako’s owner. He told the Kalamazoo Gazette ‘I just saw the restaurant was vacant and this used to be my favorite restaurant when I was a kid.”
I had been looking for an excuse to drive that far south to get dinner and I finally got it one day last week when I picked up an overtime shift that took me to Schoolcraft. It was a little out of the way but at least I was heading in the right direction.
I put in an order online before I left my downtown office for a 12″ Meat-O-Rama pizza. The thing I hate about online ordering is that it doesn’t always give you an estimated time before ordering. Once I hit the pay button, I got a confirmation saying it would be about 50 minutes. That was really pushing me close to the start of my OT shift.
I headed down Portage road hoping the time would be a little off. I got to the store about 30 minutes after I ordering. I went inside, which is only big enough for a small space to stand in front of an order counter, and told the lady working the register my name. She said that I had selected 6:50 as my pick up time. I didn’t actually select that. It’s what was given to me but…semantics. She said the pizza was sitting there ready to go in so she’d have them toss it in right away. I headed back to my car to wait until someone came out to get me or the clock hit 6:50.
No one ever came out so I headed back in at 6:50. There was a guy in front of me picking up a pizza and making a sales pitch for a sponsorship for some athletics team so I stood there patiently hoping someone would see that I came back in and hand me my pizza. When he left, the phone was ringing so the woman working the counter answered it to take an order and had to explain the entire menu to whoever was on the other line. It literally took about 10 minutes of me standing there before I was finally handed a box with my pizza in it.
Like mentioned earlier, the inside space at this building is very small. It’s really only a kitchen. There are a few tables out front with two seats but that’s the only kind of seating available at Kalako Pizza. Really, this is a carry-out place.
I was already late for my OT shift, which wasn’t a huge deal, I had time to get done what I needed to get done. I decided just to pop open the box right there in the parking lot. I was really hungry and I wanted to eat at least some of it hot before saving the rest until my shift was over.
They have options for hand tossed, thin crust, deep dish, and a double crust stuffed (think Giordano’s). I was hungry and didn’t want to spend more money on a bigger thin crust so I went for the hand tossed. The Meat-O-Rama was covered in pepperoni, sausage, meatballs, bacon and ham….and there was A LOT of it on top of this pizza.
Everything is made fresh and you can taste it. The dough is made fresh, the sauce is made fresh daily. The cheese is shredded in house. There is such a freshness to everything but it’s really the sauce that stood out. It took me a second but there’s a really distinct taste to the sauce that is soooo good. I’m guessing fresh basil and it just popped under the layer of salty meats. The hand tossed crust is pretty typical for a carry-out pizza but even that has a unique taste to it that you won’t find at the delivery chains. I was slightly annoyed at the wait time on a Wednesday night but this pizza was worth the wait.
I’m actually pretty bummed Kalako Pizza is located where it is. It’s a good 30 minute drive from my house on the west side of Kalamazoo. That was the reason we didn’t order from Chicago Style Pizza more than a couple of times. This pizza is soooo good. One of the better pizzas in the area. It’s the way it is because they take the time to make the important parts of the pizza…the dough and the sauce…themselves every day. If it was closer, this would easily become my Friday night go-to.