Detroit's pizza is a Sicilian pan rectangle, oiled and cheesed to the edge until it caramelises against the steel, and it is one of three names for one form - sfincione in Palermo, the Sicilian slice in New York, Detroit here. What the research found is that the lineage has largely left the city. Of the three founding names, only Buddy's original Conant Street address is inside Detroit; Cloverleaf is in Eastpointe, Loui's in Hazel Park, and the pan shop that trained them is in Southfield. The boundary rule keeps them out, and the result is a city record about the second generation rather than the first - which is a truer picture of where the form lives now than a list of suburban addresses under a Detroit heading would be.
This is the address the Detroit square pan pizza is dated to: Gus Guerra's first square pie in 1946, baked in blue steel pans borrowed from local auto plants. It is also the significant boundary finding of this research pass — of the lineage's three founding names (Buddy's, Loui's, Cloverleaf), this is the only one still standing inside the city of Detroit; Loui's is in Hazel Park and Cloverleaf is in Eastpointe, both separate cities.
Verified 2026-09-18
A Corktown pizzeria, opened by named brothers in 2019, that runs both the thin round "bar style" pie and the square Detroit-style deep dish side by side under one roof, which is its identity rather than a single-format specialty.
Verified 2026-09-18
A Detroit-native couple who first sold Detroit-style pizza away from Detroit — at a Pittsburgh food hall in 2017 — before bringing it home to open under the style's own street-corner name. The pizzeria closed its first Corktown storefront and reopened at the Dreamtroit development, still inside the city, and is named specifically for Detroit Red and Detroit White pizzas.
Verified 2026-09-18
Not a Detroit-style pan pizza but the Eastern Market thin-crust counterpoint to it — named for owner Dave Mancini's father's hometown in Italy, hand-stretched, and still made with Mancini's own hands in the dough by a 2024 account of the kitchen after a post-fire renovation.
Verified 2026-09-18
Southwest Detroit's naturally leavened entry in the Detroit-square field: a mother sourdough starter kept alive since a shift the owner dates to about five years before a 2022 profile, no commercial yeast, and a house rule that only the owner and his manager are allowed to touch the dough.
Verified 2026-09-18
A Woodbridge pizzeria built around a rotating, invention-led menu with a genuine vegan programme (cashew cheese and a dedicated dairy-free line), run for four and a half years as a Sunday-night pop-up in a neighboring bar's kitchen before it became its own storefront in 2016.
Verified 2026-09-18
