Pizza Around Illinois: Silo Pizza

Silo Pizza

Lake Bluff (Lake County)

February 28, 2026

Yeah… haven’t done one of these in a hot minute. But we never retired the feature!

Silo Pizza was one of the places I identified a while ago as an obvious target for this series, and an opportunity rolled around a couple of weeks ago. Being me, I naturally turned it into an even wackier time, whereby I invited my old high school chum Jadoobadoo who I hadn’t seen in 91 years!

So what’s the gimmick here? Well, the gimmick is that part of the restaurant is an actual silo. As it turns out it’s not a very large part of the restaurant, but it’s a cool visual from the outside, and then when you get inside, the whole place is unique, and a true classic, having opened in 1968.

We had a larger than usual crew: the three of us, goofball child’s friend, and special guest Jadoobadoo, everyone hungry, everyone wondering what wackiness I was up to.

Silo Pizza is on Rockland Road, Illinois Route 176, in Lake Bluff, a village along Lake Michigan. The stretch of Rockland Road is in an odd part of the state though, a little west of U.S. 41 which through Lake County has an unusual feel, like an intermediate type of important highway which predated the interstate. So the Silo is in a little commercial area across the road from a Target complex, but the area surely wasn’t like that in 1968.

When you walk into the restaurant, you actually wind up walking through the silo. By silo standards, it is small, but also, it is original to the structure, so while it is real, it was never actually used the way silos are typically used. I suppose they were just forward-thinking for their time, believing that the future of pizza was in silos.

The main part of the restaurant is sort of what you might expect for a farmhouse place constructed in the 60s. This is distinct from what a farmhouse place constructed today might look like in that you can actually imagine this being a place where rural people hang out, as opposed to some kind of rural cosplay joint. There are also model trains running around the ceiling on both levels for some reason, which adds greatly to the vibe that the place is older than it actually is, but, now that it’s been around for 58 years, the gimmick plays differently.

Silo isn’t just a pizza place - it’s got the kind of menu you might expect from an old school pizza-forward, all-American sort of place: pasta, burgers, rib dinner, etc. Pizza is the anchor though, if we’re allowed to mix nautical and farm terminology. Somebody please tell me what the farm equivalent of an anchor is, alright?

The pan pizza is highlighted as the best on the north shore. Now the thing to understand here is that in greater Chicagoland, nobody talks about pan pizza, it’s always deep dish or tavern style. So spotlighting a pan pizza is actually a differentiator, as though the silo wasn’t differentiation enough!

We got a pan pizza with peppers and onions, and I am told there was also a cheese pizza delivered to the table, but I’m not sure I ever saw it. These days I sometimes hear about food being consumed which I never actually see, but I’m still not used to the idea that this happens when I’m actually sitting at the table…

The pan pizza is solid and may very well be the best in the north shore. And I think the ambiance is great, especially if what you want is a place where you don’t want to feel hurried, and you want to just sit back with a basic American lager for a while. (Which I didn’t. I had Mr. Pibb. Which is apparently back. But different? Ah, a long digression for another time.)

As the meal was winding down, I sent the constantly growing creature around to take more photos of things like the trains, and he did so, but look, maybe photography isn’t his calling, and that’s okay. I do like the way this turned out:

Actually there’s something interesting about these being slightly fuzzy photos:

Meanwhile, at the table, Jadoobadoo and I were doing something very silly. I brought with a postcard, and a Cross pen. This Cross pen was a gift from the Winnebago Masonic Lodge in 1994 when we won the Masonic state championship for scholastic bowl. This was a very big deal to the Masons because the Winnebago lodge co-founded the Masonic tournament back in the day. And I still have the pen, and it still writes, and we used the pen to write a nice note to our coach about how we were sitting in a restaurant with a silo attached using the pen, and I hope the postcard has actually made it there!

Actually there were so many wacky things going on all at once that the one thing we didn’t pay enough attention to was the pizza itself!

So when this series started, I had a legitimate thought that the family would go to a new pizza place every month for a while, and… that was not a sensible thing to have thought. But I intend to keep this as an irregular series even if there’s only a new installment every couple of years, and I hope to keep finding unique places around the state…

… not that they haven’t already been found. Telling my dad about the excursion, his response was, oh yeah, I’ve been there, some time in the 70s. Because, of course.

But I’m especially keen on inviting more special guests to these things and giving them absurd names and making them write postcards. Who’s got a recommendation?