Spending a few days in Southern California last fall, I was sort of hankering for a pizza. Most of the pizza places I found on line seemed to be Neapolitan, wood-fired, artisan pizzas with vegetarian toppings and blistered crust. No, I wanted a PIZZA - Italian sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms with a tangy sauce and a thin, crisp crust. Lo and behold, a pizza place jumped out at me when I saw a place on-line that featured the 3 different styles of Chicago pizza - deep-dish, stuffed and thin-crust/ tavern-style. And it wasn't far away from my hotel. I ended up heading over to Rance's Chicago Pizza in Costa Mesa.
In 1991, Rance Ruiz and Aaron Tofani met for the first time at a Little League practice in Long Beach and became fast friends. As they grew up, Tofani took the pragmatic route in life studying business and finance at Cal State Fullerton. He continued his post-graduate education in real estate and construction finance and analysis at University of California-Irvine, then got his Master's in real estate development from the University of Southern California.
While Tofani toiled away at school, Ruiz was trying to figure out what he wanted to do in life. He visited his sister who was going to college up in Berkeley at California and one evening they visited Zachary's, a Chicago-style pizza joint that was a favorite of people living in the East Bay. It was at Zachary's that Ruiz had his epiphany in life - he needed to find the best of the best Chicago-style deep dish/stuffed pizza and figure out how to do it on his own. The only problem - there weren't any true Chicago-style deep dish pizza places in Orange County.
For the next few years, Ruiz traveled the country to find different styles of pizza. He got to the point where he would get a pizza and try to dissect the ingredients, even going back to the pizza parlor to ask the owner or head cook exactly what was in the sauce or the dough. It was basically trail and error for Ruiz at that point trying to come up with the perfect pan-stuffed pizza.
By 2011, Ruiz figured that he had it down and opened up his first pizza joint in Yorba Linda, CA - P.H.A.T., an acronym for "Pretty Hot and Tasty." The problem was that Ruiz knew how to make pizza, but he didn't know the business side of things. P.H.A.T. was open for about a year before Ruiz closed the business.
That's when his childhood friend Aaron Tofani came to Ruiz to offer his assistance. Tofani knew everything that had to come together to get a business of the ground, a good location, the correct procedures, the right name for the business, and having a cash flow to keep the doors open. With Tofani on board as a partner, Ruiz didn't have to worry about the day-to-day operations of the business allowing him to make his Chicago-style pizzas in the kitchen.
Pictured right - Aaron Tofani and Rance Ruiz accepting their Golden Foodie award for the best pizza in Orange County in 2016. Picture courtesy Rance's Chicago Pizza - Costa Mesa Facebook page.
The business partners settled upon finding a place in Costa Mesa based upon demographic studies of age groups in the area. They found a small space in the Costa Mesa Square shopping center and in early December of 2012 Rance's Pizza had a soft-opening before opening full bore in January of 2013.
Rance's Chicago Pizza was an instant hit. They offered the holy trinity of Chicago-style pizzas - pan, stuffed and thin crust tavern-style pizza. There was nothing like Rance's pizza in Southern California. Chicago ex-pats, patrons who had visited pizza places in Chicago, and those who were wanting to see what the hubbub was all about streamed into Rance's small 67-seat restaurant from the first day.
By 2016, the business partners were looking to expand. They set their sight on their old neighborhood of Long Beach, the Belmont Shore area. In February of 2017, the Long Beach location for Rance's opened their doors.
In 2018, Tofani had a chance to put in a Rance's in the USC Village dining hall at Southern Cal. A third Rance's opened there and things weren't right from the start. School administrators had promised that Rance's would be part of the network of USC student credit cards that could be used to pay for food on campus. However, that turned out not to be true and Rance's (along with one other restaurant) closed their doors and filed suit against USC for fraud and deception. It was probably a good thing as it allowed Ruiz and Tofani to focus on the two successful locations for Rances.
Rance's Pizza in Costa Mesa was about a 15 minute drive from my hotel. It was somewhat difficult to find as it was tucked in the back of one of the buildings between a sushi place and a ramen noodle joint in the complex at Baker St. and Harbor Blvd. (see map) The small narrow space had bench seating along the long wall with tables and chairs. It was well lit and sort of busy with both people dining in and people picking up pizzas to go. They closed at 8 p.m. and I was there after 8 p.m. when a large group of people including small children came into the place and appeared to be having a party. (I understand that the Rance's Chicago Pizza in Long Beach has a bit more character than the bland interior of the Costa Mesa location.)
I took a table along the wall toward the back of the restaurant. It was a Thursday night and I was sort of surprised to see that they had Amazon Prime's Thursday night football game up on all the flat-screen televisions hung on the wall throughout the restaurant. Having a friend who owns a sports bar and knowing how expensive it is for small bars and restaurants to show Amazon Prime NFL games games in an establishment, I was sort of surprised to see the game on the TV's.
My server for the evening was a nice guy by the name of Derek. He brought over a menu for me to look over and asked me what I would like to drink. They had a number of craft beers on tap and they rotate the selection on a regular basis. That evening they an Offshoot Relax hazy IPA on tap from The Bruery, a microbrewery from Placentia, CA.
Before Derek left to get my beer, he asked if I had ever been to Rance's before. "Nope! First time here," I said to him. Then he started to tell me about the different styles of Chicago pizza. As he started to describe the different pizzas, I waved him off. "I live about two-and-a-half hours from Chicago," I told him. "I'm there all the time and I know the difference between the pizzas."
"Oh! Perfect," he exclaimed. "So, you already know that it takes about 45 minutes for our deep pan pizzas." I told him that I certainly did. "That saves me time, then!" He went off to grab my beer.
I'm partial to a good thin-crust pizza and most people from Chicago will tell you that the thin-crust pizza cut into tavern-style squares is the REAL Chicago-style pizza and that deep-dish or stuffed pizza is for tourists only. But I have friends in Chicago who turned me onto Burt's, Lou Malnati's and Pequod's for the deep-dish style. It's just that I can't usually finish even a small deep-dish pizza on my own and usually only get a deep-dish when I'm hosting people who don't get into Chicago all that often.
A couple who were seated a couple tables down from me got the deep-dish pizza. I have to say that it looked great - big chunks of tomatoes in the sauce, large chunks of sausage and loads of stringy mozzarella that oozed off the slices Derek was putting on the plate for the couple - similar to how servers serve a deep-dish pizza in Chicago. The pizza looked very good and very Chicago-like.
They had a number of specialty pizzas on the menu. The "House Special" pizza had sausage, green peppers, onions and mushrooms; the "Best Seller" featured spinach and mushrooms (I thought of my wife who loves spinach and my vegetarian colleague when I saw that pizza); and "Rance's Favorite" - Rance Ruiz's signature pizza with meatballs, diced bacon and jalapeños. All the specialty pizzas were available in either deep-dish, stuffed or tavern-style.
Well, if you're a regular reader of Road Tips, you know what I'm always going to order - the sausage, pepperoni and mushroom pizza. That's my gold standard and a lot of people like that combination if I'm with a group of people in a pizza joint. When Derek set the small (10") pizza in front of me, it looked promising. Big chunks of sausage, fresh mushrooms, pepperoni slices with a tinge of burnt edges and loads of mozzarella.
And from the first bite it was like I was transported back to Chicago. The sausage had a spicy taste balanced out by the great flavor of fennel mixed in the meat. The pepperoni was salty and spicy, and the fresh mushrooms had that earthy tang. The pizza sauce was a perfect mix of sweet and savory. And the crust was buttery in taste and definitely thin, but the sag factor was minimal even with all the toppings on each slice. This pizza rivaled some of the better tavern-style pizzas I've had in Chicago over the years.
For me, Rance's Chicago Pizza was a spot-hitter. For anyone in Southern California who is craving a Chicago-style pizza - whether it be a deep-dish, stuffed, or tavern-style pizza - Rance's would be the holy grail. While the decor and atmosphere at the Costa Mesa location is a little sterile, I understand that the Long Beach location has a bit more warmth and pizazz. Derek's service was very good - he came over to tell me that he would be indisposed for 10 to 15 minutes working on another project for the restaurant and brought me another beer because he saw that they were going down pretty easily. For a midwesterner looking for a familiar taste and style of pizza, Rance's Chicago Pizza checked all the boxes.
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