The Making of the Queen Margherita’s Gambit

A quick note: We're gonna break the fourth wall here. We know you like to have that between us. We do too, so we're going to morph back into our united voice after this. If you want to hold on to the Dimo's-Unity dream, avert your eyes!

Conception

We want to make really good pizza. We want to make pizza so good you eat it, cheerfully, over and over again. But we also want to have fun, try new things, and get better at what we do. So we experiment! 

Because we’re obviously cool, smart, and interesting, we’re hip to the trends. When Queen’s Gambit dropped on Netflix, our team could not stop talking about it. The next natural step—make pizza about it. 

Refinement

Once the idea existed, we had a lot of planning to do. Sure, we could have gone simple. But again, we want to have fun and try new things! So how could we make it fun? And how could we make it chess-related?

First, we needed to perfect the pizza. A margherita alone wouldn’t do it; we wanted to make the tastiest f#%king margherita pizza out there. Our culinary creator, Steve, hit the R&D lab (his home kitchen). 

Meanwhile, the chess element. Chess is an old game, and doesn’t really have crowds of adoring fans. So we couldn’t plan on people having their own chess sets to play while they ate. The idea started to form: we could bring the game to you. 

Planning

The idea: an elevated margherita pizza, perfectly crafted, and accompanied by a portable chess set. A night’s entertainment, delivered by yours truly.

Back in the R&D lab, Steve was looking at classic, essential margherita ingredients. He wanted the best—San Marzano tomatoes for the sauce, fresh burrata, explosively flavorful micro basil and baby heirloom tomatoes to top it off. Sourcing these ingredients required speaking to our vendors and looking at pricing, all while thinking about how to train a team of prep cooks to properly prepare them.

While that was happening, Jay (former Wicker Park GM turned catering pro, HR badass, and general go-to guy) was looking for a board. A chess board. We knew we couldn’t buy up chess boards online and include one in every order, because that would end up being too expensive for both you and us. What we already had on hand was lots and lots of boxes. Jay called on his relationship with a screenprinting company we’d used before, Propaganda, to figure out how to print simple chess boards on our pizza boxes.

And while that was happening, Dimo’s owner Dimitri was thinking about chess pieces. The initial idea—a full shortbread-cookie chess set—quickly proved infeasible due to the cost and level of work required. He refined the idea to become a more dessert-sized set of chess cookies, and a reasonably priced set of manufactured chess pieces. 

Then, Dimitri and I (Kae, writer of emails with lots of previous titles) started looking for opportunities to showcase our Purposeful Passions. We don’t want to pass up an opportunity to further our causes, and education is at the top of our list. While researching we were happy to find a number of educational chess organizations in Chicago. We reached out to a few, and the Chicago Chess Foundation was excited to work with us to promote the pizza and spread the good word of chess!

Execution

We reconvened to review the elements: pizza, cookies, chess board, chess pieces, and donations. All we had to do was do it. 

First, Steve made some pizzas in advance of the product launch so Jay and Tara (Wicker Park brand queen and photographer) could primp, pose, and photograph it. Then he got to work training our commissary team to produce the elements of the pizza and cookies. 

Jay and Dimitri rallied the managers of our Wicker Park and Wrigleyville locations behind the product. Jay wrote up instruction sheets for each location, so that each member of our team would understand and feel confident in the product—especially important in the case of a product with a lot of additional pieces, like this. 

Once we were ready to launch, we went for it. Tara and Jay, in addition to taking gorgeous photos of our products, also run our Instagram. They started going bananas on social media while I wrote emails to you, dear crustomers. 

And once we walked, we just started to run! 

Aftermath

A huge reason we push ourselves to try new things: it teaches us how to improve our mainstays. The San Marzano tomato sauce is so delicious that we may replace our standard marinara sauce. And you may start to see this pizza on our regular menu!