Detroit style pizza?

If someone asked you to name the main regional pizzas, you wouldn’t be hard put to come up with New York and Chicago. Maybe California. But Detroit? Did most of us, growing up in Ann Arbor, even know about this? It turns out that it has a style all its own. Unlike the others, a genuine Detroit style pizza puts the tomato sauce over the cheese and pepperoni, (said cheese being Wisconsin brick) and was originally baked in square, blue steel pans used to hold nuts and bolts on auto assembly lines. 

When I put this question to the Class of ’65 Facebook group, Martha Walters Sayre and Nancy Evaldson Mirshah both hopped on to let us know that Buddy’s Pizza on Ann Arbor-Saline Road is the place to get it in Ann Arbor. The flagship Buddy’s store in Detroit claims to have the original, since 1946. Robert Berning was taught to make pizza Buddy’s style when he worked at Pizza Loy and Dairy Joy, now called Pizza Bob’s. He was the original Pizza Bob because people liked how he made it and came in asking for him by name, but a new owner, also named Bob, came in and appropriated the title. Colleen McLean Calver told us there's a Detroit style pizza place all the way down in Austin, TX, called Via 313. It was founded by a pair of brothers from Detroit and its name is a nod to the city's original area code.

According to an AARP article reporting on the four U.S. pizza styles, including how to eat each type, Detroit pizza is eaten “by hand or by fork”. Hmmm… Well, it does have a lot of red sauce right on top there and could be a tad messy. If any of you gets a sighting, let us know. Or send a picture of yourself eating a slice with a fork and we'll believe it...

Detroit pizza