Popular For a Reason

Let's be honest, pizza is the one food just about everyone can agree on, and I think that's why pizza restaurants are so popular. You can customize the toppings and sauce to fit your taste preferences, and you can even choose what kind of crust you want it on. I mean one Google search for "pizza Evansville" will bring you dozens of answers, and while this is true for most sizeable cities, there's one style of pizza that seems to reign supreme in the Evansville area and it has me perplexed.

Una Style Pizza

If you look up pizza places in Evansville, you'll find many options from chains to locally-owned pizzerias, but you'll also find many with the word "Una" in the name. I've lived in Evansville my whole life, and I know what a Una-style pizza is. It's typically a cracker crust-style pizza that is loaded with cheese and toppings and then cut into squares. But what IS Una pizza and why is it called Una pizza? Well this is when I went to Google and quickly learned, I think this is an Evansville-area phenomenon.

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An Evansville Exclusive Phenomenon

Now, maybe I'm late to come to this realization, but it seems like Una-style pizza is an exclusively Evansville area delicacy. I cannot find anything about the history of Una-style pizza on Google except for a couple of Reddit threads from Evansville and an article from Courier and Press that came out in 2018. In that article, Courier and Press states that we call it "Una-style" after an Evansville original Una pizza chain.

My Very Un-Scientific Research Findings

I decided to do some very unscientific research and asked two of my close friends who aren't from Evansville if they had ever heard of "Una-style" pizza. My friend Katie is from the Indianapolis area and when I asked her she said that she is not familiar with the term una pizza. Then I asked my friend Devon, who moved to Evansville from Washington State. When I asked Devon if she had ever heard of una-style pizza before moving to Evansville her response was "Before I moved here, no, and even now I'm still not really sure what una pizza is." Therefore from my very small research pool, I'm starting to conclude that Una-style pizza seems to be a very exclusively Evansville-area phenomenon.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Evansville's Una Pizza Places

In the Evansville area, we have dozens of locally owned pizzerias that serve up their unique spin on Una-style pizza. I'm not even going to attempt to name them all, let alone pick a favorite. What I can tell you, is I've never met an Evansville Una-style pizza that I didn't like!

And from an Evansvillian like myself, I can tell you, if the pizza joint is located in a small old building, takes cash only (or only recently started taking cards), and has about zero online presence except for maybe a super old website, it's probably going to be some of the best pizza you've ever tasted!

If you know more about pizza history than I do and can offer any more insight here, I'd love to know more! My email is Melissa@WKDQ.com.