You could say Billy Zureikat was reborn on the day he fell while walking his dachshund Einstein.
For eight years the doctors couldn’t figure out why his legs were losing muscle mass and giving out from under him. Basketball had been a big part of his life, but while the avid shooting guard’s game steadily declined, he’d gradually developed a new passion—for cooking.And it wasn’t long after he’d been diagnosed with Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy 2L, a rare, untreatable form of the degenerative disease, that he’d achieved a major kitchen breakthrough.
He’d been calling the Detroit-style pie blanketed in a shishito pepper cream sauce with cheddar, corn, and pickled jalapenos the “Sheesh that’s Corny,” but as he struggled to regain his feet on the Logan Square sidewalk, he noticed a woman staring at him coldly, failing to help. “She looked at me like I was a peasant,” he says. “I was hiding what was going on. That incident was a wake-up call to embrace who I am.
Since then, the Tripping Billy has been served at 13 different pizzerias, all to raise awareness and funds for medical research. Zureikat adopted the name to rep all the pop-up collaborations he’s done since then. There was the Tripping Grilly grilled cheese sandwich with J.T.’s Genuine. There was the Knishing Billy at Manny’s Deli; the Tripping Billy burger at Goose Island; a