Gino's East

Gino's East
633 North Wells St
Chicago, IL
Neighborhood: River North
Gino's website
One of our goals with this blog is to discover and critique interesting, unique and relatively lesser known restaurants in Chicago. But every once in awhile we have the desire to experience the popular, well-known Chicago restaurants that every tourist has on his or her "things to do in Chicago" list. Right up there with the Willis Tower and the Bean, perhaps one of the most popular destinations in Chicago is Gino's East.


Jenn and I ventured to Gino's on a late afternoon on a weekday, so it wasn't too busy. There were aspects of Gino's atmosphere that we both liked and disliked. Like: the fact that visitors can leave their autograph on walls, tables and basically any other available surface. Dislike: the dark ambiance was a little too dark for us, especially for a 2 o'clock lunch. We ordered our pie and had to wait a whopping 45 minutes, but our waiter at least warned us that it would take that long. Another complaint is how pricey their pies are. Seeing as its a well known Chicago pizza establishment, we understand that people come here for that experience and history (and hopefully for the pizza itself), and not for its value. Well aware of this, we decided to share a small 8" cheese pizza, no toppings, no appetizers, no drinks, and our bill still came out to over $20, tip included. Based on the value factor alone, we would probably not come back.


The pizza itself was decent. Good, but not great. We really liked the sauce, which was chunky and tangy. There was too much cheese and the crust was flaky and buttery, but nothing that great. It probably would have been better with some toppings to negate the volume of cheese. Like most deep dish pizza, it was very filling and the 8" small was enough to fill us up. We enjoyed the pizza for the most part, but there are definitely better places to get pizza in Chicago. Overall, Gino's is a pricey tourist attraction with decent but not great pizza. We give it a 7.6 out of 10.
Quality of Food: 8.0
Value: 6.8
Atmosphere: 7.3
Customer Service: 8.3
Overall: 7.6