Who Is Johnny And Why Is He Making Pizzas?

Johnny Squares Pizza Co. (2025) was founded by Josh Downey, also founder of Chicago Johnny’s Co (2011) and author of The Chicago Pizza Cookbook (2024).

When Downey graduated college during the housing market crash and recession of 2009, he began making giardiniera at home as a way to save money; giardiniera turned into a small little business where he delivered out of the trunk of his 29 year old Volvo car stopping at small shops around Chicagoland. This small business gained some traction online and with cooking videos that he made, and now his olive oil giardiniera and midwestern cherry bourbon bbq sauce are available at all Jewel Osco locations.

Shortly after starting Chicago Johnny’s Co in 2011, Downey started to really hone in on Chicago style pizzas. He took notes, adapted recipes, took more notes, experimented with flour types, fat types, baking styles, et cetera. This process culminated late in 2024 with the release of The Chicago Pizza Cookbook (available here).

With the release of the cookbook, Downey found an opportunity to actually make pizzas in a commercial kitchen. Through this opportunity he modified one of his recipes to work with commercial equipment. Thus, Johnny Squares Pizza Co. was started in the summer of 2025.

As he started writing a business plan he came up with a goal; to offer “Top-Notch Pizza”. In his experiments for the cookbook, he made some square pizzas with extra dough and loved the extra crust, plus “corner pieces” are actually corner pieces! Stumbling on what may be a good thing, making pizzas in squares not only makes more uniform pieces, but a 12” square is 144 square inches in area, a 12” circle is about 113 square inches in area… giving you nearly 30% more pizza by making it a square instead of a circle!. Plus, making square pizzas gives more crust, and a crispy edge is one of the best things about Chicago thin crust pizza!

Working in the kitchen from an early age, Downey is taking this opportunity to really explore his pizza knowledge. Having written the cookbook for use at home, Johnny Squares Pizza Co is giving him the opportunity to continue exploring Chicago pizza. One of his self proclaimed “things I’m good at,” is that he really has a good hold on flavor combinations and balance. He has a hard time toning things down, traditionally working from one extreme to the other and then ending up somewhere in the middle. This cooking style helped Downey to understand a dish better by making it extremely ‘bland’ or ‘basic’ and then remaking that dish with ‘extreme’ flavors, and understanding the spectrum of the dish better and almost always ending up somewhere in the middle.