Detroit Style Pizza in Lloyds Detroit Style Pan. Detroit-style pizza is a rectangular pizza stone pizza with a thick crust that is crispy and chewy. It is traditionally topped with Wisconsin brick cheese that goes all the way to the edges and caramelizes against the high-sided heavyweight rectangular pan.
The pizza was developed in 1946 at Buddy’s Rendezvous, a former speakeasy owned by Gus and Anna Guerra located at the corner of Six Mile Road and Conant Street in Detroit. The restaurant was later renamed Buddy’s Pizza. In 1953, the Guerras sold it and opened the Cloverleaf in Eastpointe, Michigan. Buddy’s Pizza chief brand officer Wesley Pikula, who started at Buddy’s as a busboy in the 1980s, said that he had never heard the term “Detroit-style” before the 1980s when a trade magazine used it and that even afterward it was seldom used except in national trade articles.
The Detroit-style pizza was popular throughout the Detroit area but until the 2010s was not often found at restaurants outside the area. In 2011 two Detroit brothers opened a Detroit-style pizza restaurant in Austin, Texas, using the “Detroit-style” name as a point of differentiation. In 2012, local restaurant cook Shawn Randazzo won the Las Vegas International Pizza Expo world championship with a Detroit-style pizza, and according to pizza educator Tony Gemignani, the reaction was immediate. After he won, I must have had six phone calls from operators, from guys who are big in the industry, saying, ‘Give me a recipe for Detroit. According to Serious Eats, “in early 2016 or so, everyone seemed to be talking about it or writing about it or opening up restaurants devoted to it. Trade journal Pizza Today wrote in 2018 that “Perhaps no pizza style has entered the public consciousness in quite the way that Detroit-style pan pizza has.
