Since I'm not going to bother covering the Field Museum's McDonalds, there's only one more of these to write after this one. We're back to Saturday night, and Pizzeria Uno. So. Pizzeria Uno.

You may well wonder why someone who seeks out Japanese burger joints on his iPad would deign to dine at the touristy mouthwaters of a deep dish pizza chain. Well, I'll tell you why.

First, all the Unos in Minneapolis dried up a few years ago. By which I mean the only Uno in Minneapolis. Which I liked going to from time to time. Second, there's culinary history there. And third, as tourists, it behooved us to do some touristy things, dammit.

Let's start by focusing on the experience. The space itself is old and cramped in a nice honest, old-school way. It doesn't look like they ever even considered gutting the insides and remodeling it to match their chain decor. I like that. There's a bunch of shit written on the walls - so much I assume it's a thing (and Google semiconfirms it). Most of it's dark-on-dark in a dark room, so I couldn't read any of it, but what I could see was about the level of toilet-wall Sharpie tagging.

Since deep dish pizzas take the better part of an hour to cook, you don't even get to put your name down for a seat unless you order your pizza first. Which is a reasonable and clever solution to make the best of our half-hour wait for a table. We ordered a spinach pizza and added mushrooms to it.

At the table, we looked at the meager appetizers list and settled on garlic bread, even though pizza is already bread with cheese on it and marinara sauce. It was... fine. I mean, Italian restaurants have been serving garlic bread this way for decades, so it wasn't exactly a revelation, but it was perfectly competent.

Same with the pizza. It was... fine. Except for the crust. Now, I've had deep dish pizza before, and I've had Uno pizza, or at least Uno chain pizza before, and the main draw of deep dish pizza is the buttery, thick, savory crust. But this time, the crust was neither buttery nor savory. It was merely underseasoned and a bit oily. Fine if there's sauce and cheese and spinach and mushrooms on top of it, but get to the bare end, and you've got something you could have used as packing material.

Would I go back? No. Even had the pizza been better, it's the kind of restaurant you go to in order to have gone there, and apart from the history, everything on the menu is something you can eat at lots of places, even a few locally. I might, however, be interested in trying one of the places Internet food snobs eschew Uno's in favor of.