If you haven’t been following along, here’s the quick recap: On deployment, I get $68 a day for food. Whatever I don’t spend, I get to keep — and with kids in college, that money matters. Plus, I’m a man who can eat for a lot less than $68 a day. Tuna packets and dignity are basically free. But… when in Rome, right? And Rhode Island has its own Rome — a Roman Empire made of chowder, clam cakes, pizza, and milkshakes promoted like folklore. I tried the famous Awful Awful because everyone said you had to. Didn’t live up to the hype. Not bad — just… I’m from an area with real milkshake chops. We don’t hand out superlatives lightly. This deployment was also my first time being out solo for ten full days. I met up with a teammate a few times, and one night he suggested dinner. We hit up Shannon View Inn , an Irish bar close to my hotel. Good call on his part. I ordered fish and chips that came with a mountain of French fries . The kind of mountain that would’ve made my mother...

Let’s get one thing straight right from the top: being from New York comes with an unspoken rule — we believe we’ve cracked the code on pizza. Not just “good pizza.” The pizza. The slice you fold. The slice you eat while walking. The slice you can get at 2 a.m. from a guy named Vinny who’s been making them since the Reagan administration. Paper plate. Grease drip. The whole sacred ritual. So whenever someone outside of New York brings up pizza — and they always do — there’s this inevitable reply: “Yeah, but have you had Chicago pizza?” And here’s where my internal monologue starts revving up like a cab driver approaching the Midtown Tunnel at rush hour. But I’m a grown-up now (or at least pretending to be one), and I told myself on this trip to Chicago that I would approach this like an adult professional. Be open-minded. Try new things. Learn. Explore. Maybe even embrace a different pizza culture. The Deep Dish Experience We started, of course, with the legendary deep ...