Pizza Around Illinois: Q's Restaurant and Pizzeria

Hillside 1/27/23

Q’s Restaurant and Pizzeria

Hillside (Cook County)

January 27, 2023

You would be forgiven for missing Hillside. It has a census population of 8,320 and is bisected by the far west end of the Eisenhower Expressway. Thousands of people drive through it daily without knowing it’s there.

Hillside is a cemetery suburb. The big one is Mount Carmel Cemetery, final resting place for gangsters and archbishops. When the cemetery went in, Hillside was a rural village. Only in the late 1950s and 1960s - after the expressway went in, it would seem - did the town fill in with the living.

Q’s opened on Butterfield Road in 1959, as part of a small commercial stretch in the middle of the new development in the north half of Hillside. It might not be the kind of place you go in search of the old-school. But if you want to talk about a pizza place that’s a local institution, well, here’s one that’s been there for 63 years, and opened along with the surrounding neighborhood. Erstwhile afterthought suburbs like this are the old-school now.

Q’s is one of those tavern / restaurant combinations where there’s a dining room on one side and a bar on the other side, feeling a bit like two different establishments with an open door between them.

How old-school is the clientele? The people who sat next to us were sitting down for pre-show pizza. They were on their way to see “The Rat Pack is Back” in Rosemont.

Okay, okay, you say, this is all fine. Where’s the freaking pizza?

In local parlance, this is tavern-style or pub-style pizza. Some people who really like to talk about such things will go into great depth about how this is the true Chicago-style pizza: a thin rolled crust, cooked long enough to be crispy, cut into squares, ideal for consumption with various lagers.

We’re vegetarian, and we don’t usually get too exotic, so what you see above is a basic large pizza with onions and green peppers on one side, the other side just cheese. Unless you’re a self-declared sausage expert - and if you are, please don’t declare that out loud - I suspect you’ll agree that this is actually a pretty good way to assess the quality of a pizza, because you’re not getting into a lot of crazy stuff. You’ve got crust, sauce, cheese, and just enough toppings to make the necessary kind of assessment.

My wife’s remark was that on a pizza like this, it’s actually just the cheese side where you have to assess, which she rated excellent. She thought the vegetable side a little blander. I thought both sides were very good. If you grew up on this kind of pizza, of course you’d always to keep coming back for more - it’s simple, precise, very well done, and is probably an especially ideal match for something like a lite beer.

Q’s, it should be noted, has RC on draft - that’s Royal Crown cola to you - which is an especially good thing for a pizza place. (The syrup mix was a little off that night though.) I have heard tales in my life about long expeditions to get pizza from places with RC on draft, and this I think is an understandable thing to do.

There was also a garlic dipping sauce requested, and while I didn’t partake, it was definitely a hit at the table:

That dipping sauce is still a topic of conversation in the house, and it’s almost two weeks later! (It took a little while to get this write-up finished up…)

Overall this was pretty much exactly the kind of place this whole series is designed to look for: old-school pizza place, in a sort of unexpected or overlooked location, with pizza that easily justified the journey. Where should we go next?