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The DMV is known for a lot of things: motorcades, cherry blossoms, eighth-grade field trips. Deep-dish pizza — a.k.a. Chicago style — is not one of them.

Characterized by its thick crust (often made with cornmeal) and a sauce that rests on top of the cheese, this heavy pizza is difficult to perfect and even harder to find around Washington.

If you’re looking for a Chicago-style pizza experience that’s a cut above the Uno Pizzeria in Union Station, here are a few options to make you feel, with each bite, like you’re in the Windy City.

Pi Pizzeria

A few steps from the National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian American Art Museum, you’ll find Pi Pizzeria. This small chain restaurant serves both deep dish and thin crust pizza (including a gluten-free option of the latter) at its Gallery Place location.

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A small deep-dish pizza starts at just under $17 and boasts a thick cornmeal crust and a variety of choose-your-own toppings or house combinations that were crafted specifically for its deep-dish pizza. The Chicago-style pizza is filling, and the edges of the crust are slightly thinner than a traditional deep-dish pizza. That makes for a nice crunch.

The restaurant also has a large bar where patrons can enjoy a drink or a personal pizza and watch sporting events on the many TVs.

Pi Pizzeria, 910 F St. NW, pi.pizza.com/washington-dc. Small pies start at $16.95 plus toppings.

Della Barba Pizza

What began as a Union Kitchen start-up has morphed into a boutique pizzeria with an intimate dining space and a small but mighty menu.

Housed in the former Al’s Gourmet Pizza, Della Barba offers four styles of pizza: New York, Nonna (thicker than the New York pie), Detroit and Chicago. The standard deep-dish is designed to feed two people, though patrons can purchase a “mini” if they can’t handle a whole pizza by themselves.

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The deep-dish pizza is made from a dough of flour, butter and corn that is fermented for a few days before being rolled into a two-inch-deep steel pan and filled with cheese and sauce.

Della Barba Pizza, 1382 East Capitol St. NE. dellabarbapizza.com. $26; $14 for a Chicago-style mini.

DC Chi Pie

While waiting for DC Chi Pie to open two forthcoming locations — one in Ivy City and the other inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center — you can satisfy your deep-dish cravings with a pie from its (mostly) Chicago-style takeout, housed in a temporary Southeast kitchen.

In his 2022 review, Washington Post critic Tim Carman noted: “This pie was a dense puck, perfectly round, its thick, imposing crust looking like castle walls that had to be scaled. The sauce was, according to deep-dish traditions, evenly distributed across the surface, and a row of overlapping pepperoni slices formed a cool stripe down the middle of the pie, each circle blackened on the part of the sausage exposed to the high heat of the oven. This thing had heft, too, like the weight of a good pan.”

DC Chi Pie, 5011 Ivory Walters Lane SE. dcchipie.com. $20-$30.

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