Great American Bites: Imo's, St. Louis' unique contribution to pizza
— -- The scene: According to the pizza worshipper's website, slice.seriouseats.com, there are 21 distinct regional styles of pizza in this country. 21! Many, like "DC jumbo slices," are simply splitting hairs. However, two varieties are particularly unique and the most easily identifiable: Chicago deep dish and St. Louis-style. Deep dish has gotten plenty of exposure, mainly thanks to the Uno's chain, and most Americans are familiar with it. Not so for St. Louis-style, virtually never found outside the Midwest. In fact, I have seen authentic St. Louis-style only once elsewhere, at Tony's Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco, a spectacular pizzeria devoted to recreating various regional styles, which I featured in this column last year.
Even in the Midwest, it exists only in specific places, but in St. Louis itself, it is everywhere (it also resides over the border in Illinois and in the Kansas City metro area). It is so ubiquitous that they do not follow Chicago's tradition and call it "St. Louis-style" - to locals it is simply "pizza," or in many cases, "Imo's." The largest pizza chain you never heard of, Imo's is to St. Louis pizza what McDonalds is to hamburgers: an all-powerful franchise founded by Ed and Margie Imo in 1964. "We didn't invent it, we just popularized it," said Margie Imo. "It's the kind of pizza we grew up eating, what we knew."
Imo's was the first pizza chain in St. Louis to offer delivery, and became so popular that there are now roughly 100 branches. I dined at the one location actually owned by Margie and Ed, Forest Park South, but they are all essentially the same - decidedly fast-food places. You order at the counter and eat at synthetic tables while sitting on molded chairs. Besides pizza - in five sizes from personal to XL - they offer pastas, salads and sandwiches, but that's missing the point. It's low on atmosphere but high on history and uniqueness, with a passionate legion of fans. The Imo's chain sells more than 5,000,000 pies annually and has come to personify St. Louis-style, even though it's available at lots of other pizzerias, restaurants and bars. Imo's pizza shells and sauce are also sold in supermarkets.
Reason to visit: Pizza.
The food: Four things distinguish St. Louis-style pizza from all others. The dough is very, very thin, but unlike New York thin-crust, it is also unleavened. More flatbread than dough, it is a perfectly flat, perfectly round, crunchy disc, with no raised edge or "crust." The cheese is equally idiosyncratic, never mozzarella or ricotta or quattro formaggio, but rather something called Provel. A processed blend of cheddar, Swiss, and provolone cheeses, Provel comes in square logs like American cheese at the deli counter, and looks suspiciously like a lighter colored version of Velveeta. The tomato sauce is sweeter and less acidic than usual, with a heavy hand of oregano, a combination long popular in the city. Finally, once cooked to a bubbling temperature, pizzas are cut into a checkerboard pattern rather than wedge-shaped slices, so you get inside pieces and outside pieces, mostly squares about three by three inches. This gave rise to Imo's marketing slogan, "The Square Beyond Compare," even though the pizzas are round.
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