Imo's Pizza

Ed Imo was a tile-setter by trade in the late 1950s, working construction jobs across south St. Louis and eating his lunch at a small pizza place called Melrose Pizza on The Hill that served what would now be recognized as the prototype St. Louis style. Ed and his wife Margie loved the cracker-crust format but thought the delivery business was undeveloped, and in 1964 they opened their own shop on Hampton Avenue with a phone number, a station wagon, and a willingness to deliver hot pizza directly to customers' homes. The combination of cracker crust, Provel cheese, and home delivery was, in 1964, genuinely revolutionary in the Midwest.

The cracker crust itself is a product of necessity and ingenuity. St. Louis-style pizza dough contains no yeast—it is a flat dough rolled paper-thin and baked at high temperature so the crust crisps almost like a savory cookie. The lack of yeast was originally an economic decision by Depression-era Italian-American bakers who wanted to use less flour and avoid the wait time of a rising dough, and the style became regionally codified through the 1940s and 1950s by Italian-American pizzerias on The Hill and in nearby Dogtown. Ed Imo did not invent the crust style, but he industrialized it, branded it, and made it the dominant pizza of the city.

Provel cheese has a stranger origin than the crust. In 1947, a St. Louis-based grocer named Hugo Costa worked with the Wisconsin-based Roma Cheese Company to develop a processed cheese product specifically for St. Louis pizzerias. The original goal was a cheese that would not strand or string when cut, allowing pizzerias to cut pies into the rectangular party squares preferred by local customers. Provel is sold today almost exclusively in the St. Louis metropolitan area, with limited distribution in central Missouri and southern Illinois. Imo's purchases Provel by the truckload from the Roma facility in Wisconsin and is by far the largest single buyer of the cheese in the world.

Every first-time visitor should order a large Deluxe, which is the classic Imo's combination of sausage, pepperoni, mushroom, green pepper, and onion on the standard cracker crust with extra Provel. The large is 14 inches and cut into roughly 16 rectangular pieces, enough for three adults or four with a side. The Sicilian, a thicker pan-style version on a slightly puffier crust, is the alternative for visitors who find the cracker crust too thin, and the gluten-free crust is available on request. The fresh sausage is house-seasoned with fennel and red pepper and is the meat topping that most distinguishes Imo's from cheaper imitators.

Beyond pizza, the original Hampton location serves a small menu of Italian-American sides that round out a full meal. The toasted ravioli, breaded and deep-fried Italian ravioli served with marinara, was invented in St. Louis in the 1940s and Imo's makes the unofficial city standard, served by the half-dozen or dozen with a paper cup of marinara for dipping. The Italian salad is a chopped iceberg, romaine, and red-onion mix with artichoke, olive, and pepperoncini under a sweet Italian vinaigrette, and the meat sandwiches—Italian sub, salami, and roast beef—are built on a Vito's bakery roll trucked in from a few blocks away on The Hill.

Soft drinks include the obligatory Vess, the local St. Louis-brewed soda line that includes Whistle Orange and the citrus Mac Frieda's, both of which are vintage Route 66 era drinks rarely found outside the region. Birra Moretti and Peroni are on tap, along with local craft beers from Urban Chestnut and 4 Hands. The dine-in room at the Hampton location seats about 60 at red-checkered tablecloths, but the majority of business is still pickup and delivery, the model Ed Imo invented in 1964.

No food in St. Louis is more polarizing than Imo's. Visitors from cities with established pizza traditions—New York, Chicago, New Haven, even Detroit—frequently arrive expecting something familiar and leave bewildered or actively offended by the cracker crust, the rectangular cuts, and especially the Provel cheese. Bon Appétit ranked Imo's the worst major-city pizza chain in America in 2014, an opinion the city took as an attack on its identity and which generated weeks of impassioned local newspaper columns. Saint Louisans defend Imo's the way Philadelphians defend cheesesteaks: not because it is universally great but because it is unmistakably theirs.

The Provel question in particular has become a kind of regional shibboleth. The Wall Street Journal published an essay in 2018 calling Provel an insult to cheese, and the response from St. Louis food writers ran for three weeks across multiple publications. The fundamental argument for Provel is structural: on a crust this thin, mozzarella's stringiness and moisture would destroy the texture, and Provel's low-melt, low-moisture properties are what make the entire format viable. The fundamental argument against Provel is taste: it does not have the lactic depth of fresh mozzarella or the bite of aged provolone, and some pizza traditionalists consider it processed cheese in the worst sense.

The reality is that Imo's is not trying to compete with New York or Naples. The cracker crust, the Provel, the rectangular squares, the toasted ravioli, and the Italian salad together form a coherent regional cuisine that emerged from working-class Italian-American neighborhoods of mid-century St. Louis and was perfected by the Imo family beginning in 1964. The original Hampton Avenue location is the cathedral of that cuisine, and any honest food tourist visiting St. Louis on Route 66 has to try it at least once, with an open mind and the awareness that this is not Brooklyn pizza and is not trying to be.