Lantern Pizza Co. To Sling Slices At Salt Shed For Pizza City Fest

DOWNERS GROVE, IL — It's going to be a pretty busy weekend for Lantern Pizza Co. The family-owned Downers Grove restaurant is one of just 40 pizzerias chosen to serve up slices at the 2nd Annual Pizza City Fest at the Salt Shed in Chicago Aug. 26 and Aug. 27.

The event, the brainchild of NBC "Food Guy" Steve Dolinsky, is invite-only, husband-and-wife owners Dan and Kim Coudreaut told Patch. Dan said they got an email from Dolinsky inviting them to take part in the festival shortly after Lantern Pizza Co. was featured on a segment of "The Food Guy" last November.

Lantern Pizza Co. will be at the two-day festival Sunday, joining the likes of such beloved pizza shops as Lou Malnati's, Home Run Inn, Jimmy's Pizza Cafe and Vito & Nick's.

"We’re shoulder to shoulder with some of the best pizza makers in Chicago, so it’s awesome," Dan told Patch.

Ahead of the event, the team at Lantern Pizza Co. will prepare four times as much dough as they typically do for a normal day of business.

“We’ve been asked to be prepared to make 1400 slices of pizza," Kim told Patch, so, as you can imagine, we’ve got an army in the back prepping."

Dan, who is the head chef at Lantern Pizza Co., and his team of bakers are adept at working with their own hand-built brick oven, which reaches temperatures of up to 900 degrees and fires up the pizza within two minutes.

Since they'll be using electric ovens at Pizza City Fest, Dan and the bakers recently went to Wheeling to test the ovens and optimize the way their pies would bake in them. Dan told Patch the pizzas they'll make for the festival will just take a few minutes longer.

On the menu for Pizza City Fest are two of Lantern Pizza Co.'s most ordered pies. Vegetarians can indulge in a gooey mozzarella cheese slice topped with cheese and tomato-basil sauce that's crafted in-house. Meat eaters can sink their teeth into a slice of pineapple and bacon pizza, with pineapple that's been roasted in butter and brown sugar, smoked mozzarella that's made in-house, balsamic glaze and crisped bacon.

During the festival, Kim will be in Downers Grove running the pizzeria while Dan, two of his managers, Danielle and Alex, and an employee, Rachel, will be prepping pizzas by hand for the more than 2,500 people expected to attend Pizza City Fest.

General admission tickets for Pizza City Fest are $95 per person and include 10 festival-sized slices of pizza, unlimited alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages and free sides, salads and desserts. Tickets also include admission to the event's panels and seminars, where pizza makers will collaborate and other experts will share tips and talk about their love of pizza.

"People just love to talk about pizza," Dan said.

Kim added that "the pizza community is rallying for this."

Meanwhile, being selected for Pizza City Fest has filled the Lantern Pizza Co. family with a sense of pride, the Coudreauts explained.

“We’re making something people are interested in," Dan said, calling the festival a "great opportunity to get the Lantern message out and to get our pizza into people’s mouths. That’s really the moment of truth, when you taste it.”