A Portrait of Our Lincoln Square:

Lincoln Square is family-oriented, close-knit, residential. Maybe a tad insular. It often feels like walking around a small town, pedestrian-run, interconnected, and occasionally cobble-lined. It makes sense that the Lincoln Square Dimo’s used to run as a Dimo’s Cafe, as this slice shop functions the most similarly to a sit down place. Regulars dine in for lunch, Groups come in for family dinners, couples come in for date nights. Not that this is unheard of at the Wrigley and Logan spots, but there it’s more integrated with their bar scenes, resulting in a chaotic late night, by-the-slice atmosphere. While at Lincoln Square it isn't uncommon to get 12” pizzas and a bottle of wine to share. Maybe Lincoln Square is just more relaxed, slower pace. 

Cat Birk, one of our Lincoln Square staff members, describes the design ethos as “Maximalist,” “Un-rushed,” and “Part of the architecture of the restaurant.” We’d agree. The interior reflects the mood of the restaurant, wooden booths and tables, a funky paint job, and probably over a dozen plants. If you go right now, you’ll see pizza boxes on the wall covered in hand-drawn dragons, a relic from a Game of Thrones watch party that’s legacy is a set of dragons left up to please the children of the neighborhood, and all the rest of us. 

We can find the neighborhood mirrored in the staff too. Lincoln Square has a small but tight team. It is compact, efficient, but not serious. The closeness of the team is built on levity, a good-hearted foolhardiness. It’s a bit difficult to imagine oneself stony-faced in such a playful setting, though we’re not immune to bad days. The staff are united by their varied outside passions; you can’t be too serious if pizza is not that serious to you. Cat does painting and sculpture, Turner is in school, Danny flies planes, etc. etc. Cat feels trusted. She refers to the team as well-organized, and benefits from the individual autonomy of the store. The sense of the store is specific, hard to define, but is tailored both to staff and the Lincoln Square community.

The team has stayed largely the same over the last couple of years, though the store itself has undergone structural changes. What began as a Dimo’s Cafe, serving stuff like pork tenderloin with chestnuts confit, and focaccia with chili crisp and habanero honey, is now the slice shop you see today. Turns out sticking to pizza was what worked for us, but the earlier hours and more sit-down atmosphere of the cafe stuck. So we went back to our roots and turned Lincoln Square into its current form, just keeping the parts of a cafe that suited the neighborhood essence. 

Since that change, Lincoln Square has blossomed into a vibrant community space. Just this May we reopened a full bar in-store with Danny at the helm. And every month there’s something new in the works. Drag Bingo, Trivia Nights, Happy Hour, etc. And surely more is to come. 

Love,

Dimo’s