Hip to Be Square
Photo by Jonathan Gayman.
It’s a running joke on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that the host detests Imo’s Pizza, the local chain that made St. Louis-style pizza ubiquitous, since being introduced to it by his wife, Molly McNearney, who hails from the Gateway City.
Naturally, when other St. Louis natives like Jenna Fischer, Ellie Kemper and Jon Hamm visit his show, Kimmel asks them about Imo’s. He even had some delivered for Hamm during a 2013 episode.
“For those who don’t know, you’re from St. Louis,” Kimmel says to Hamm. “There’s a pizza place that I’ve been at odds with called Imo's Pizza in St. Louis. Now, it's a beloved chain in St. Louis and ... the pizza, by the way, is terrible.”
Hamm, of course, disagrees, and digs into the pizza as well as Kimmel’s argument. “You want to get the middle piece. Because that's where all the good stuff is,” he instructs.
Kimmel is unimpressed. “What does it taste like?”
“You can taste the Gateway Arch,” Hamm says. “It tastes like 11 World Series victories.”
That’s the thing about St. Louis-style pizza – for locals, it stirs a particular sort of hometown pride. The square-cut pizza is iconic in St. Louis, and today seems almost as central to the city’s identity as beer or baseball. The same is true of pizza in cities like New York City, Detroit and Chicago, which each lay claim to their own definitive styles of ‘za.
Regardless of your zip code, though, we generally consider pizza as fundamentally American as hot dogs, cheeseburgers or apple pie. Yet less than a century ago, it was barely known of in St. Louis – let alone debated as one of the city’s most celebrated dishes.