"For all our opinions about pizza, Chicagoans are still pretty open-minded. We’re known for deep dish, but we embrace thin-crust, St. Louis-style, Detroit-style, New Haven-style, and even 3D-printed Neapolitan hybrids brought to us by time travelers from the future. We’ll eat it all, unless it isn’t very good. Which is unfortunately the case with the pizza at Bar Cargo in River North. Not everything about the pizza here is bad, so we’ll start with the good part: the crust. It’s Roman-style, so thicker and airier than a Neapolitan crust, and it has a crispness that holds up well to toppings. This would all be fantastic, if the toppings were good. But they’re problematic. Take the namesake Bar Cargo pizza, for instance, which has sausage, soppressata, meatballs, and pancetta. The meat tastes highly processed, it’s way too salty overall, and the cheese is thick and bland. The carbonara pizza, with pancetta, egg yolk, and pecorino cheese, has similar issues: all traces of the egg yolk flavor are masked by the saltiness and rubbery texture of the meat. It’s a shame that these ingredients overshadow a crust that would taste excellent on its own. Other, non-pizza menu items are also disappointing. For example, the coccoli appetizer has balls of fried dough that are unpleasantly dense, plus stracciatella cheese that looks and tastes more like Laughing Cow. The tenderloin sliders have tough, too-dry buns that are almost impossible to bite through. The pear and arugula salad, with chopped dates and gorgonzola, has a nice balance of sweetness and saltiness, and the butternut squash ravioli is decent. However, at $14 and $17 respectively, those feel expensive for very average plates. There are other places doing better salads and pastas, and they have quality pizza, too. Bar Cargo has loud music, dark wood decor, and neon signs on the walls that give everything a red glow. It reminds us a lot of a TGI Friday’s, and we’d be willing to overlook that if the food was better. But too much of it just doesn’t really work. We take pizza seriously in this city, and there are a lot of good places to get it. You have to be doing something pretty impressive if you want your spot to be worth Chicagoans’ time. At the end of the day, there’s just too much great stuff going on elsewhere for you to eat Bar Cargo’s mediocre pies." - Adrian Kane
