The Murray State News

Issue date: 8/22/08 Section: Features

Media Credit: Misty Hays A Mugsy's specialty, deep dish pizza with sausage.

Robin Phelps
News Editor

Doctors say once sugars and salts are introduced in infants' diets they will no longer eat food from the tiny jars of bland, puréed baby foods like peas and bananas to which they were once so accustomed. This theory was the same for me.

I don't know how old I was or where I was when I ate my first slice of pizza, but I knew this was something I would enjoy eating forever. Naturally, with any other food eaten too often or too much, I slowly became burnt out on my new favorite food. So I took a hiatus from pizza, but not for long.

Only exposed to the type of pizza that the vast majority of Americans order from pizza deliverers such as Papa Johns and Pizza Hut, I was in awe of this new style of pizza I discovered in Murray at Mugsy's Hideout.

The downtown Murray eatery, run by Chicago natives Jay and Maria Baron, operates Tuesday through Saturday and is located at 410 Main St., about a five-minute drive from campus. The restaurant features a Chicago theme, house made ingredients and a menu fraught with authentic Chicagoan entrees.

Among the various items on Mugsy's menu was the new kind of pizza I came to uncover Tuesday afternoon.

I didn't know what to expect when co-owner Jay appeared through the kitchen.

After asking the owner what was good on the menu, I decided to order the Italian sausage, Chicago-style deep-dish, a specialty of the restaurant and a dish, that originated at Chicago's Pizzeria Uno in 1943.

"It's built like a pie and it's cooked in a brick or a stone-bottomed oven … it's more like a lasagna with bread," Baron said. "It's our own recipe, our own concoction."

I'd eaten hundreds of slices of pizza prior to my experience at Mugsy's, but I could think of no memory of pizza to compare to this. I'd eaten the pizza with the stuffed crust, the pizza with thin crust and even tried the pizza with pineapples on it once in third grade, but this was incompatible from pizzas before.

With the bubbling, steaming surface of tomato sauce wafting the aroma of Italian spices in the air, the deep-dish pizza sat before me. I had never felt so intimidated by a food than this.

Continued...

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