Great Lake makes the most profound and puzzling pizza in Chicago, but it is not a pizzeria.
It’s a small grocer and small bakery, said Nick Lessins, co-owner and co-operator with Lydia Esparza. The spouses reopened their business in Andersonville last June. It is more of a reinvention.
Yet Lessins still makes all their pizzas that are the stuff of legend and lore. Were they named the best pizza in America? Yes, in 2009 by GQ magazine veteran food writer Alan Richman. Did Beyoncé wait for hours like everyone else? Yes, but only about an hour (with husband Jay-Z) in 2011 when she was pregnant and nearly due with daughter Blue Ivy Carter. Did Great Lake refuse a pizza order by an assistant to Oprah Winfrey for the talk show host to eat on a flight to Africa, or was it the West Loop? Maybe.
But I’m going to focus on this incarnation.
When you do find the artist’s atelier-meets-industrial kitchen space on a quiet side street just around the corner from busy Clark Street, it remains difficult to identify, literally and figuratively speaking.
“It’s a daytime operation,” Lessins said. “As opposed to the previous Great Lake, which was more dinner-oriented and focused strictly on pizza and salads.”
Esparza still makes all the ethereal seasonal salads, along with some notable new items.
“What’s great is we’re starting to feel it out,” she said. “And people are feeling us out too.”
The magnificent mushroom pizza, however, needs no introduction for those who’ve willed its return. Showered with feathery shavings of earthy cremini mushrooms, over buttery bits of aged Gouda cheese, and pops of heat from Tellicherry black peppercorns, it is their signature creation. The crust, though, is different, even better than when we last met, transformed by time apart. Russet and rustic, it captures the crisp tang and lingering chew of artisan sourdough bread, rendered artfully in pizza form. It’s thin, but absolutely not a Chicago-style tavern. It’s puffy and blistered around the edge, but not Neapolitan.
So what is their style of pizza?
“I don’t know what it is,” Lessins said. “It’s just making a crust that meets what I consider my ideals in terms of texture and flavor.”
So a certain level of crispness, not wet, yet airy.
“I want to have every texture you can experience in bread,” he said. “And obviously not a throwaway crust — it’s not just a carrier.”
An exquisite garlic pizza may be the only one available with a bright tomato sauce, out of three or four on the daily changing menu. Smudged red, with clouds of house-made mozzarella and petals of that aromatic allium, it’s a quiet ode to a cherished traditional pie. This pizza also hints at a slice that may be the origin of the Great Lake style.
Jim Lahey, the baker and owner of Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City, made a focaccia when he first opened in 1994.
“I brought back a piece when I was on a trip for work,” said Esparza, about her parallel life in design. “A little sliver in a sleeve.”
It didn’t look like much, said Lessins, and was a day old and room temperature when they tasted it.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It was just brilliant.” His partner agreed. “I was like, holy crap,” she said. “This is good.”
That moment led to the Great Lake that opened in 2008 to obsession, and closed after five years of exhaustion in 2013.
The business went dormant, but Esparza and Lessins did not. They’ve continued their culinary practice for 13 years culminating in their current moment.
Trotters To Go was a model, said Lessins. The everyday takeout place by the late chef Charlie Trotter closed in 2012.
“And there’s other places in Ann Arbor like Argus Farm Stop and the whole Zingerman’s empire,” he added about the food businesses in Michigan. “We try and do our own version of mixing retail food with what we prepare in the kitchen and doing it in an approachable way.”
It took them almost 15 months to build out the space.
“We had a Chicago Recovery Plan grant that paid for about half of the build-out, which was considerable,” Lessins said. “I joked that I forgot what the point of this all was, it was just so draining.”
The terrazzo floor was inspired by some Esparza saw in Milan on another work trip, and the design is all hers.
“I would joke that it was like grandma modern,” she said.
The old Great Lake famously had 14 seats. The new Great Lake has six, at three tables of different heights: standing, dining and bar.
“I don’t want to call it a restaurant, because it’s not,” said Esparza, whose parents grew up in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. “It’s like a grocer if you go to another country.”
A wondrous farmers market salad featured her distinctive thinly sliced cuts, transforming white Japanese turnips, orange carrots and green winter radishes into translucent curls. Esparza’s chickpea salad, with tender garbanzo beans from Rancho Gordo and sharp goat feta by Zingerman’s Creamery, will forever ruin anything with canned legumes.
Lessins’ dense Danish rye bread is a horizontal sourdough monolith that’s heavy and hard to slice, eventually revealing a stunning cake-like crumb.
A roasted pecan peanut butter, made in-house with Missouri pecans and Virginia peanuts, is neither creamy nor chunky (thank goodness), but a silky suspension of finely chopped nuts that’s annoyingly amazing at $25.75 for a 15-ounce jar. Fragrant house-made Bartlett pear preserves pair perfectly for a luxurious yet familiar PB&J, as do summery apple peach preserves.
The heirloom bean sauce pizza, on the other hand, with white cabbage and that dreamy house-made mozzarella, pushes the boundaries so far that I’m not sure that it translates as pizza as much as a handsome flatbread. A capocollo pizza, perhaps their most classic creation, loses the Italian dry-cured pork even on a judicious canvas of tomato sauce and fresh mozzarella, but it’s still a fine pie.
Potato kale egg cakes, sold refrigerated in three to a box, and potato leek soup, sold frozen in quarts, are unlovely, but hearty.
Cocoa nib cookies appeared to be in the same beige school of flavor, but they are in fact extraordinary. Crisp yet chewy, crackling with intensity, they are their own Great Lake style of chocolate chip cookie.
“I will give Nick credit for the cocoa nib,” said Esparza, who makes all their cookies. “So Nick was like, ‘I think your cookies are best without any chocolate chips.’”
She began with an old Betty Crocker recipe card from their “Men’s Favorites” series in 1971, but started stripping away some of the ingredients, and adding Dandelion Chocolate cocoa nibs and India Tree Muscovado sugar.
“The funny thing about those cookies is that almost by design and by purpose, they don’t look like anything special,” Lessins said. “We want to make things look nice, but at the same time, it’s getting to the elemental.”
When Esparza worked for Herman Miller in new product development, it was important for the little humble things to be impactful.
Rye crackle cookies, modern and minimalist double chocolate delights, she credits to Chad Robertson, the baker who co-founded Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. He published the recipe for his chocolate-rye cookie in the cookbook Tartine Book No. 3. But Esparza substituted butter with olive oil, for her fantastically fudgy cookies.
“Some of our customers perceive us as a health food sort of establishment,” Lessins said. “But don’t get us wrong about the butter, I mean, we love butter.”
Pecan butter chocolate coconut balls, lovely truffles that are not too sweet, round out a regular rotation of treats on the market shelves that offer a carefully curated selection of food, housewares and books. Drinks include Jun Bug kombucha brewed with raw honey in Chicago, plus they just added tea made to order, featuring a yellow sprig single bush oolong from Guangdong, China.
Great Lake is a two-person shop. They have one employee, said Esparza, but I didn’t see anyone else during my two visits. For dinner, I phoned ahead for pizza, unheard of with the old Great Lake. They only take phone orders for takeout, but with an open table at the end of the night, I had my first reunion bite of mushroom dining in. Following bites held up just as well, 15 minutes and even an hour later, plus my ultimate test, for breakfast the next day.
“Most of what we make is not something that has to be eaten hot out of the oven,” Lessins said. “I would say they taste better once they settle.”
I highly recommend going on an afternoon if you can, when you might have a chance to actually chat with the couple, possibly about how in the world this is their retirement plan. As a fellow Gen Xer, who grew up in the restaurant industry, my back hurts just thinking about it. In an industry and society that equates new with young, they are breaking down barriers again.
“We wouldn’t be able to do this if we were on a traditional restaurant or grocery schedule,” Lessins said. But their hours of operation are more than double what they were previously. “We’re just trying to pace ourselves so we’re not dropping dead with exhaustion.”
They are 61.
“I feel like I’m more physically fit now than when we first met in college,” said Esparza about her husband. They bike daily on a short commute, even on the coldest days of the year. “So it’s not a shock for us.”
They signed a 10-year lease two years ago, with an option for another 10, which means if all goes well, they’ll be running Great Lake until they’re nearly 80, not unheard of in Chicago.
“We’re not really a bakery, we’re not a grocer, we’re not a restaurant,” said Lessins. “We’re a mix of all these things.”
That’s just what it is, and that’s great.
Great Lake
1476 W. Berwyn Ave.
773-656-1476
instagram.com/greatlake_bakery_grocer
Open: Wednesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. (closed Sunday to Tuesday)
Prices: $36 (mushroom pizza), $34 (garlic pizza), $32.50 (bean sauce pizza), $22 (winter farmers’ market salad), $25.75 (pecan peanut butter), $14 (pear preserves), $13.75 (Danish rye loaf), $2.50 per ounce (cocoa nib cookies), $2.50 per ounce (rye crackle cookies)
Sound: OK (56 to 58 dB)
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible front, but back restroom not accessible
Tribune rating: Three stars, excellent
Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; zero stars, unsatisfactory.
Meals are paid for by the Tribune.
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