My Pi makes great pizza — judging by the glowing customer reviews and the pizzeria’s frequent appearance on many “best of” lists.
Sometimes that’s not enough.
The Bucktown pizzeria, with a sauce recipe that began simmering in Larry Aronson’s brain in the early 1950s, is set to close at the end of June, said the restaurant’s current owner, Richard Aronson, who is Larry Aronson’s son.
Sobbing emojis and broken-heart symbols began popping up on the My Pi Instagram page as soon as Richard Aronson made the announcement there this past week — blaming bad luck and a murky economic outlook.
Wrote one fan: “Nooooooo. I’m so sad. The best vegan pizza I’ve ever had. (No) one has ever come close!”
My Pi, 2010 N. Damen, is perhaps best known for its deep-dish pizza, boasting of its secret sauce made with San Marzano tomatoes grown “in the lush valley area around Modesto, Calif.”
Larry Aronson opened his first restaurant in Rogers Park in 1971, eventually expanding to 20 locations in nine states. But as the leases expired on those locations, he eventually closed them down.
In a way, Richard Aronson seemed to be well-positioned to weather the storm brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic because his Bucktown location, which opened in 2000, was more of a delivery and pickup spot than a sit-down restaurant. They also shipped pizzas.
“Shipping picked up 400%; so that got us through COVID,” he said.
But after the pandemic, customers craved the restaurant experience.
“There’s also a tremendous amount of competition just four blocks away at Milwaukee, North and Damen. That started appearing with that renaissance of pizza. So where there used to be zero pizzerias, there became 12 pizzerias, and that’s one of our main markets,” Aronson said.
He said he just doesn’t have the funds to convert the Bucktown space, the chain’s last location, into more of a dine-in experience.
And then there’s the economic turbulence of the Trump administration.
“In this case, we don’t have the ability to wait it out for as long as it might have to be,” Aronson said. “Even if I could raise the funds, it becomes a crazy idea to spend all that amount hoping that when you open the dining room, the general economy isn’t getting crushed like I live through in the Great Recession.”