Since opening Generations Pizza in Acworth in October 2019, husband and wife Steve and Kim Ortiz have seen countless natives from the Quad Cities hit up their restaurant, hungry for a style of pizza not readily found outside that region of the Midwest.
Appropriately, Generations Pizza’s first official customer was a former Quad Citian who drove over from her home in Johns Creek. (The Quad Cities is a cluster of cities on both sides of the Mississippi River: Rock Island, Moline and East Moline in Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa.)
Then there was the pair of married couples who graduated from Moline High School in the late 1940s and early ’50s. At Generations Pizza, they exuberantly ate their way down memory lane to the point that they stood up and sang their school song.
“We had a couple that drove five hours from Florida, just for our pizza,” said Kim Ortiz who, like her husband, grew up in Rock Island. “It’s fun to hear some of their stories as well. And just to talk about your memories.”
What sort of pizza inspires singing in a restaurant or a five-hour car ride?
Credit: Courtesy of Paula Pontes
Credit: Courtesy of Paula Pontes
First, there’s the dough, which contains malt molasses. When baked, it lends the crust a darker look and a subtle, sweet-nutty flavor.
The sauce gets a hit of chile flakes and cayenne pepper, making it slightly spicier than most. Sausage is a customary topping. It’s lean and seasoned with fennel, finely crumbled and scattered across the whole pie.
Then, there’s the generous amount of mozzarella cheese that blankets everything and keeps the fresh toppings from overcooking, Steve Ortiz said. Lastly, the pizza traditionally is cut into strips using scissors, rather than a pizza wheel or knife.
For more background, I rang my cousin, Tony Bianchi, who lives in Clinton, Iowa, about 40 miles north of the Quad Cities. Tony first encountered this style of pizza at two pizzerias called Frank’s and Harris, and he prefers the Harris product. “The taste is absolutely fantastic,” he said, noting how the fennel in the sausage leaves “the type of taste that sticks with you for hours.”
Credit: Ligaya Figueras
Credit: Ligaya Figueras
You can experience that lingering hint of anise on a standard sausage pizza at Generations, or on one of their specialty pies, including the deluxe, the all-meat and the German, a unique combo of sausage, Canadian bacon, sauerkraut and onion. The old-school way, Steve Ortiz explained, would be to double-grind the sausage in-house; Generations gets pork sausage crumbles from Atlanta Sausage Co.
This style of pizza will fill you up. The crust is medium thick, with a noticeably raised cornice. The dough recipe that Generations uses came by way of Bill Cole, a high school pal of Ortiz’s from Rock Island, who brought Quad Cities-style pizza to Harrisburg, North Carolina, with his Pub 49 restaurant. (Although Cole since has sold the place, Pub 49 still offers these pies.)
At Generations, the pizza is baked in a 480-degree Roto-Flex convection oven, turning out a pie that’s chewy inside and a bit crusty at the edges.
Quad Cities expat Molly Slavin of Summerhill recently heard of Generations and is interested in comparing its pizzas to the pies of her youth. “There are two sorts of main chains: Harris and Happy Joe’s. I grew up on the Happy Joe’s side of things,” said Slavin, who was raised in Morrison on the Illinois side but attended high school in Bettendorf. “Happy Joe’s also instituted something called taco pizza, which is also very affiliated with the region,” she said.
Credit: Courtesy of Paula Pontes
Credit: Courtesy of Paula Pontes
Ah, yes, the taco pizza. Generations Pizza offers this Mexican-Italian hybrid, which dates to the 1970s. Refried beans or a red sauce base (your pick, but I’d go with the refried beans) are spread on the Quad Cities-style dough, then it is topped with sausage and shredded cheddar and mozzarella cheeses. Once baked, it gets loaded with shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes and crushed Doritos — real Doritos. It comes with squeeze bottles of medium and hot taco sauce, so you can drizzle to your liking.
Eating this pie reminded me of my own Midwestern upbringing in the 1970s and ’80s, believing that hard-shell tacos stuffed with ground beef, cheddar, lettuce, tomatoes and a packet of hot sauce was real-deal Mexican. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I enjoyed this weird, crunchy pizza.
Credit: Courtesy of Generations Pizza
Credit: Courtesy of Generations Pizza
Ortiz said that they chose the name Generations in order for the restaurant to tie in with “the idea of pizza through the ages and its place in pizza lore.” It’s a nod to the first-generation originators of the style, he said, and to the second generation, “who worked for the original stores, then broke off to begin their own pizzerias, typically located within the Quad Cities.”
And then there’s the third generation — Kim and Steve Ortiz, and folks like them, “who have taken Quad City-style pizza outside the borders of the Quad City metropolitan area and introduced it to the nation.”
Even though their Acworth restaurant is far from the Quad Cities, the tradition is being passed on. “We are developing a new generation of kids,” Ortiz said. “When parents ask where they want to eat, they scream out ‘Generations Pizza!’”
IF YOU GO
Generations Pizza. 4-9 p.m. Wednesdays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, noon-8 p.m. Sundays. 3969 S. Main St., Acworth. 678-653-8383, generationspizzamenu.com
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