About Us
Steve Owens
PizzaioloSteve worked for many years at a non-profit in a role as bizarre as it was boring. For the majority of those many years, Steve moonlit at Table, Donkey & Stick, primarily assisting servers and manning the stump. In 2019, Steve began screwing around with crust at home. In 2022, he began screwing around with crust in a part-time professional capacity. In 2023, he took crust on full-time.
In 2025, Matt let Steve take over the Table, Donkey & Stick kitchen for an evening. People indicated they liked the pizzas. The next day, Matt asked Steve if he’d be interested in making pizzas for people at the Sterling Food Hall. Perhaps, Matt mused, the people there might like the pizzas, too. Steve figured it couldn’t hurt to see. Then there was Dada.
Steve hails from Cleveland, has lived on coasts East and West. He is a fan of Cleveland sports, but not so much the Browns. He has a fiancé and cat and could do neither lyrical justice. He holds a film degree, owns a couple of books. He was shaving his head before he went bald.
Matthew Sussman
ProprietorMatt grew up in New York on a steady diet of slices and pies, and has always held pizza close to his heart. Matt opened Table, Donkey & Stick in 2012, shortly after moving to Chicago , followed by Danke and Bar Parisette. Matt got into restaurants largely out of his passion for handmade breads and frequently experimented with pizza for friends and family.
Matt wrote a business plan for a pizza concept in 2019, but got his first taste of the pizza business when Table, Donkey & Stick pivoted to a takeout restaurant during the COVID shutdown. Ever since, he’s been looking for the right opportunity to bring world-class, east coast pizza to Chicago. When Matt recognized Steve’s passion he knew it was time.
Matt is thrilled to eat his favorite pizza in the city whenever he wants, and to share it with his quality control assistants, Alexander and David, who also call him Dada.
What is Dada?
The Dada Art movement emerged in response to the experience of alienation and dehumanization brought on by mass industrialization at the turn of the 20th century, and the corresponding industrialization of death during WWI. A century later, we find ourselves at a similar inflection point, contemplating how to coexist with chatbot poets and drone bomber pilots. Pizza as we now know it emerged around the same time as Dada, responding to the same shifts in technology and social organization. We don’t know what comes next, but at least we have pizza, and the possibilities it represents for deliciousness, community, and connection.
Our Pizza
Our mission is to make a perfect east coast style slice, informed by Steve and Matt’s experiences in the New York Tri-State region over several decades. We believe that dough is what separates great pizza from the rest. The foundation of Pizza Dada is our pizza dough, which incorporates four specialty flours, sourdough and poolish pre-ferments, and a 48-hour fermentation. There’s nothing else like it in Chicago.
