Unless you travel in rarified circles — Nobel Prize winning physicists, Academy Award winning actors, world-class athletes — you are not likely to come in contact with many true geniuses in your life. But for years, if you wanted to see a certified genius at work, all you had to do was visit a dimly lit restaurant near the Morton Grove Metra Station. Plying his trade in that unlikely venue was a true genius, Burton Katz, known to all as Burt.
And part of the bargain was that you could sample his handiwork because Burt’s genius lay in making some of the world’s best pizzas.
The world learned of Burt when world famous chef Anthony Bourdain visited the restaurant for his TV show “No Reservations” in 2009. Prestigious chefs worldwide covet Bourdain’s seal of approval, but for Burt it was little more than another day at work. To the true genius, public acclaim is merely incidental.
There was no other pizza place anywhere exactly like Burt’s. Decorated with yellowed newspaper articles, assorted bric-a-brac from decades past, and old radios Burt had collected, walking into Burt’s was like traveling in a time machine back to the 1940s. Not a recreation of the 1940s like some theme restaurant, but the actual 1940s.
Regulars knew not to simply walk into Burt’s and order a pizza because Burt cooked all the pizzas by himself and he preferred you preorder. People who walked in unaware of that had to wait until the preorders were done. This might take several hours and if the hour was late, Burt simply refused to seat them. Imagine coming from Hyde Park, or worse Maine or Colorado, to taste Burt’s pizza and being turned away. Nearby pizzerias did good business off those unfortunates.
As customers arrived, they were greeted by Sharon, Burt’s good-natured wife and muse. When their pizza was ready, Sharon would serve it on the International House of Pancakes plates bought from a closeout sale. She never tired of explaining why you were eating pizza off the plates of a pancake house.
Bound for life by pizza, Burt and Sharon were quite a couple, married over 50 years. Where Burt was gruff, Sharon was sweet. With his long, gray beard, Burt resembled an aging member of ZZ Top; Sharon looked much younger than her years and must have been mistaken more than once for Burt’s daughter. Together, they resembled a 1960s hippie couple straight out of Woodstock, but they were hardly flower children. Burt had been a Marine and Sharon possessed a savvy business sense.
Part of Burt’s genius resided in his utter charmlessness and the lack of attention he showed his customers — at least in the traditional restaurant sense. He proudly flouted every rule in the restaurant owner’s manual about interacting with customers. He rarely emerged from the kitchen and when he did make a brief disagreeable foray into the dining room to grumble at customers (regulars knew it was an act), it was left for Sharon to assuage ruffled feelings, which were invariably unruffled by the great pizza.
Burt had no patience with complaints about the pizza, the atmosphere or any other grouse from the patron. His attitude was “if you don’t like it here, go somewhere else and eat what they pass off as pizza.” And he was right.
Likewise, he had no patience for compliments — he brushed them off as casually as he did criticism. He knew his pizza was good, he knew you knew it, and he knew that’s why you were there. His feeling was that he owed his customers a good, reasonably priced pizza — and he never disappointed. That was his way of showing customers he cared for them.
When customers were finished, he never asked them to come back — it didn’t seem to deter a steady stream of regulars who needed no encouragement. And every so often, when the place was closing up, if your party was the last seating and no one else was around but Sharon and him, he just might pull up a chair to talk. Not so much about pizza, but jazz, politics or whatever he saw fit to discourse on. He rarely talked for more than five minutes but it was the highest honor Burt could accord a customer — the equivalent of Johnny Carson inviting a new stand-up comic to sit down on “The Tonight Show” couch.
With Burt Katz’s death, the world lost a genius whose brush was a Blodgett pizza oven and whose medium was cheese and pepperoni, sausage and mushroom. He was the Michelangelo of pizza, and as Michelangelo is believed to have said, “If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn’t call it genius.”
Cory Franklin is a Wilmette physician and author of “Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases.”
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