Phil R
Google
We weren’t supposed to be there. No, the plan was a different pie, a different joint, a different corner of southeast Wisconsin. But fate is a filthy trickster with grease-stained fingers and a twisted sense of humor. The other spot, some hotshot pizza shack with misleading Google hours and a busted sense of time, was closed. Dead. Lights out. So we pivoted — a sharp left turn into the ghost of old Racine and straight into Wells Bros.
The place sits humble — no neon lies, no reclaimed barnwood, no damn Edison bulbs. Just a brick box on a working-class artery, parked proudly in a part of town where men still call lunch “dinner” and a handshake means something. You step inside and it’s like stepping back into a version of America that hasn’t quite died yet: clatter of plates, the low hum of human labor and laughter.
A waitress — weathered, wiry, kind — eyes me up and asks what I’ll have. “I’ll eat,” I say. Gruff but kind, like a tired dockworker with a taste for the poetic. She smirks. She’s seen worse. The booth is classic pizza parlor relic — Formica top, vinyl chairs with that telltale crackle of decades of ass. A white paper placemat, a single artificial rose in a bud vase. This ain’t kitsch. It’s religion.
I order like a man possessed:
• 14-inch sausage pizza, thin crust — Milwaukee style, I presume.
• Mostaccioli with two meatballs.
• Antipasto salad that smelled like it was built by Sicilian saints.
Now let’s get one thing straight — I’m a child of St. Louis. I cut my teeth on cracker crust, Provel lies, and the fast-twitch reflex needed to fend off midwestern heart disease. But I’ve run the gauntlet:
• I’ve had foldable Bronx slices at 3 a.m.
• Wood-fired Neapolitans in L.A.
• Deep dish in downtown Chicago that eat like lasagna.
• Detroit oil pan masterpieces like blackened love letters from hell.
This, though… This was something else.
First came the salad and pasta — a curtain-raiser in this operatic performance. The antipasto? Sharp. Briny. Alive. The kind of salad that makes you realize most other salads are passive-aggressive lies. The mostaccioli? Forget about it. Meatballs the size of bruises, tender like secrets passed between lovers. Sauce that could make a mafioso weep. The Pepsi was perfect. Carbonated clarity. The water was cleaner than it had any right to be, considering we were a mile from a sewage plant and the ghosts of Racine industry.
And then — The Pizza.
It landed on the table like a UFO. No warning. No fanfare. Just there. Thin crust, cut in tavern squares — a geometry lesson in ecstasy. One bite. That’s all. That was it. My vision blurred. My knees went soft. I saw the Virgin Mary doing shots with Frank Sinatra in a red vinyl booth.
The crust: crisp, whisper-thin but powerful. Held its own under the weight of cheese and sauce without a single soggy surrender. The sauce: sweet, robust, unpretentious. Like it had been simmering since Roncali was Pope. The cheese? Mozzarella — maybe more — melted into some perfect symphony. And the sausage… Damn, the sausage. Fennel, grease, crackling edges. It screamed into my soul like a V12 Ferrari launching down Wisconsin Avenue with no brakes and a bottle of cheap champagne in the glove box.
The bottom? A cornmeal kiss from the gods. Blackened bits from pizzas that came before, a generational memory of flavor burned into the stone of the oven like primitive cave art.
It was so good I almost wept. Maybe they were showing off because the mayor was sitting across the room — or maybe this is just how Wells Bros. does it. Every day. For everyone.
It wasn’t just a meal. It was a baptism. A return to the primal fire. A pizza so good it made me question every life choice I’ve made, every frozen mistake I’ve eaten in silence.
Wells Bros. didn’t ask to be special. They just are.
God bless ‘em.
