When I first met Dave Lichterman, owner of Windy City Pie, it was just a few days after “Back to the Future Day,” aka October 21, 2015, the day Marty McFly time-travels to in the movie Back to the Future Part II. Lichterman told me he had dressed up as the character Doc Brown to deliver his Chicago-style deep-dish pizzas that day, which confused many of his customers. (He also tried, unsuccessfully, to find a DeLorean to drive around in.)
Lichterman cracks a lot of jokes, but he grew serious when he told me that the Back to the Future movies actually had a profound influence on his life. They inspired him to pursue a degree in engineering at the University of Illinois, where his own future as a deep-dish pie master was sealed—even though it took him 10 years (and an entirely separate career as a software engineer) to realize it…
