Twenty-six years on the same corner

It’s not a coincidence he ended up here. Al grew up two miles east, in Elmwood Park, watching his mother run Adele’s Deli, the family restaurant his parents opened in 1979. The kitchen was his classroom. She’d let him help; he’d stand on a crate to reach the counter.

When he opened his own shop twenty years later, he brought two things with him: the way his mother worked with her hands, and a thin-crust recipe from a family friend in Italy. Eighty years old, that recipe. Passed to Al, cooked in the same oven every day since.

“We were given this 80-year-old recipe from a very dear friend of ours from Italy.”

Al Karalis

The corner

Norridge is an island. Literally. The village is completely surrounded by the City of Chicago, incorporated in 1948 by neighbors who wanted to keep Chicago from swallowing them. Cumberland Avenue is the border. Al’s Pizza sits on the last Norridge block before you cross it.

The neighborhood grew up Italian and Polish. A lot of the customers still are. The rest are Chicagoans who drive across Cumberland because, as one Reddit regular put it, the pizza is worth it.

The regulars

Some have been coming here since the year Al opened. There’s a customer who lived in Norridge from age 2 to 14, moved into the city, still drives back for a slice. There’s a “pizza club” of gentlemen who sit at the counter almost every day. Al’s has hosted baptisms and wedding rehearsals. It’s where the neighborhood eats.