As a Texan with a wife from Detroit, other than individual little pizzerias, Jets is gonna be the best Detroit style you’ll probably find.
Gotta give it up for Buddy’s in Detroit though.
Detroit really is a great place to get food though.
My BIL, trying to get enough airline miles for something, once flew into Detroit just to eat, then flew back. He is enamored by aviation though, the type of person to go to the airport to watch planes take off and land. Then again, he gets into the centurion club free, so he can wait until the last minute to get to his gate, and get free food and alcohol so maybe he just misses most of the hassles of flying.
Detroit-style pizza is a rectangular pan pizza with a thick, crisp, chewy crust. It is traditionally topped to the edges with Wisconsin brick cheese, which caramelizes against the high-sided heavyweight rectangular pan.
I’m not sure what style the pizza I like is called, it’s just pizza. But I know I detest Chicago deep dish, and new york style. One is more of a casserole than a pizza, and the other is like paper with toppings on it.
You probably like what I’ve heard called Napoli style. That’s a normal crust that’s not super thin but also not super thick. It is supposedly the traditional style. But this is from American places so IDFK 🤷🏻♂️
A good quality Detroit-style, like from Buddy’s or from Frank’s in Wyandotte a little Southwest of Detroit, those are my favorite pizzas. If I’m getting something cheaper like Jet’s though I actually prefer the round.
As a long time NY style preferrer, I was basically 100% certain that I’d hate Detroit style. Surprisingly, I loved it. It’s the only way I make pizza now. It’s so fucked up. How did they completely fuck up pizza yet make it so good? The sauce goes on top? What the fuck?
Anyways, I’ll probably burn out on it before long (eating a Detroit style pizza is a commitment) but it blew my mind when I finally tried it last year.
I’m going to guess the places I went had their own twist on it, but I’m offended you think I could mistake a Detroit style for a Chicago style.
Chicago styles are defined by being utterly disgusting and inedible round deep dish casseroles from a state whose entire cuisine revolves around turning everything into a casserole. The sauce goes on top as a matter of preference.
And, like you said, Detroit styles are defined by the pan they’re baked in, with Wisconsin brick melting down the sides and forming a burned cheese crust. The ones I’ve had – admittedly mostly local joints not in Michigan and only once or twice from a real Jet’s or Buddy’s-- mainly threw a couple splashes of sauce on top, but wildly unevenly, nothing at all like the even layering of a Chicago style “pizza”
I know. Most of the places I’ve been – and the recipes I’ve found for Detroit style – have the cheese on the bottom with a couple splashes of tomato sauce on top. I’ve only been to a Jet’s or Buddy’s once or twice and I guess I dont really recall where they put the sauce.
These were still nothing at all like a Chicago style, which I generally categorize as either a war crime or a lab experiment hybridizing pizza and casserole gone horribly wrong.
Regardless, even if cheese on bottom with sauce on top isn’t characteristic of Detroit style, it’s a remarkable innovation in pizza science. And I don’t mean that you should fill a deep dish casserole with dough, cheese and sausage and pour several pounds of tomato sauce on top like you need to load up on fats and protein to cope with the wind chill in Chicago
I love Via 313, but it's gone downhill in recent years, unfortunately. The wait times are ridiculously long, the prices have skyrocketed, and the quality has lowered. Honestly, I could deal with the lower quality if either the price or the wait time went down. It's bad enough paying $15 for a small pan pizza, but it's even worse when it takes 90 minutes to get to you, after you've already been in line for 20 minutes.
Though, that's true for pretty much all the pizza places around here. They've all just gotten progressively worse, and it's really sad. :(
As a Michigander it’s funny to me that 4 major nationwide pizza chains are from Michigan (jets, hungry howies, little Caesars, and dominos), I don’t really think of Michigan pizza as particularly noteworthy.
Long time sf bay resident I think best east bay Detroit style is fat apples in Berkeley or El cerrito. (And since it keeps coming up in the comments, best east bay deep dish/chicago style is little star over Zachary’s, I live between the two off solano and stand firm in this decision)
I’ve lived in the Detroit area all my life and only a couple of years ago did I realize that it was a regional style of pizza. Just always assumed square pizza was a norm. And I just don’t prefer it to a standard round pizza with a thick sauce.
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