The day was circulating on holiday-listing calendars by January 2014, which is the earliest record of it located. No founder, sponsor or establishing document has been found, and HathiTrust's digitised run of Chase's Calendar of Events, covering editions from 1958 to 2007, carries nothing under the name.
CHAPTER 01
Three men and one room
Uno Pizzeria and Grill, which that restaurant became, still tells customers it invented deep dish in downtown Chicago in 1943 and credits Ike Sewell, its later owner. Sewell was a Texas-born college football star who came to Chicago in 1934 to work for a liquor company. He became Riccardo's de facto partner in February 1944, after the doors had opened, and his wife signed the agreement.
The other name in circulation is Rudy Malnati Sr., who managed the pizzeria for years. The archival record makes him its third manager, starting in February 1951. The Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson and the researcher Peter Regas both credit Riccardo, and Regas says plainly that nobody has definitively identified the creator.
Sewell's own account put Riccardo at the centre of it. "It wasn't that I believed in deep dish pizza," he told a magazine in 1977. "It was that I believed in Ric Riccardo."
