How A Square Pizza from the Motor City Conquered the World.

Photo courtesy of The Original Buscemi's Pizza.

Crispy, lacy, caramelized edges. A thick crust that's somehow airy and chewy at the same time. Sauce ladled on top in bright red stripes. If you've bitten into a corner slice of Detroit-style pizza lately, you've tasted one of America's great regional originals — a pie that spent most of its life as a local secret before exploding into a national phenomenon.

It's certainly a story that resonates with our team at Nino Salvaggio International Marketplace, as it does now with millions of pizza lovers well beyond Metro Detroit. Thus, we thought we'd take a look at how a square pizza from a Detroit neighborhood bar conquered the world.

It Started in a Tavern in 1946

The story begins on the corner of Six Mile Road and Conant Street on Detroit's east side, at a neighborhood spot called Buddy's Rendezvous, which would grow into the brand all Detroiter’s know: Buddy’s Pizza. Owners Gus and Anna Guerra had been running the place for years when, in 1946, Gus decided the menu needed something new. Soldiers returning from the war had come home talking about pizza, and the Guerras set out to make one of their own.

Anna turned to her Sicilian roots for the dough — a recipe descended from sfincione, the thick, spongy focaccia-style pizza of Sicily. With help from longtime employee Connie Piccinato, who refined the recipe over the years, the team baked their first square pies. It was, by most accounts, the first square pizza of its kind in the United States.

A classic image of the women of Buddy's that helped create Detroit-style Pizza. Photo: Buddy's Pizza

The Secret Was in the Pan

Here's the detail that makes the whole story so quintessentially Detroit: the pizza's signature texture didn't come from a fancy oven or an old-world technique. It came from auto parts.

Gus needed something sturdy to bake in, so he asked his regulars — many of whom worked in the city's tool-and-die shops — to bring in the heavy blue steel trays they used to hold small parts and catch drips on the factory floor. Those thick, high-sided pans turned out to be perfect. The steel held intense heat, crisping the bottom of the crust while the deep sides let the dough rise tall and stay tender inside.

In the Motor City, where the auto industry produced just about everything, those repurposed pans became the backbone of an entirely new style of pizza. That make-do ingenuity is a big part of why Detroit-style is considered a true American original.

What Makes It Detroit-Style Pizza?

A few things set this pie apart from its New York and Chicago cousins:

• Cheese to the edges. The cheese — traditionally Wisconsin brick cheese — gets pushed all the way to the rim of the pan, where it melts against the hot steel and caramelizes into a crunchy, golden frico crust. Those corner pieces are the most fought-over slices on the table.
• Sauce on top. The tomato sauce goes on after the cheese, usually in two or three thick stripes down the pie. Locals call it the "red top."
• A double-proofed dough. The high-hydration dough is left to rise, stretched to the corners of the pan, then proofed again. The result is a crust that's crisp on the bottom and pillowy in the middle.
• It's rectangular, but it's a "square." Detroiters have always called it a "square pizza," even though the pans are rectangular. For generations, ordering one meant saying, "let's grab a square."

Decades as a Local Secret

For a long time, this pizza barely had a name. Buddy's chief brand officer Wesley Pikula — who started there as a busboy in the 1980s — has said he never even heard the term "Detroit-style" until a trade magazine used it that decade. As late as 2007, local outlets were still calling it "Sicilian-style." Some out-of-town makers were even hesitant to attach Detroit's name to it.

The style kept evolving across metro Detroit, though. After the Guerras sold Buddy's Rendezvous in 1953, they opened the Cloverleaf Bar and kept baking squares there. A former Buddy's employee went on to found Loui's Pizza in Hazel Park. Local institutions like Buscemi’s, Shield's, Luigi's, and the national chain Jet's carried the torch. But for half a century, this remained a pizza you mostly had to be in Michigan to enjoy.

The National Breakout

Everything changed in the 2010s. As Detroit natives scattered across the country after the 2008 financial crisis, many couldn't find the square pies they'd grown up on — so they started making them. In 2011, two Michigan brothers opened Via 313 in Austin, Texas, leaning into the "Detroit-style" name as a point of pride. A year later, Detroit cook Shawn Randazzo won the Las Vegas International Pizza Expo world championship with a Detroit-style pie, and the pizza world took notice almost overnight.

From there, it snowballed. The style spread to New York, San Francisco, and even Australia and Canada. Yelp reported a 52% jump in reviews mentioning "Detroit-style pizza," and eventually even Pizza Hut rolled out its own version — a sure sign a regional dish has gone mainstream.

A Taste of Detroit History

Today, Detroit-style pizza stands proudly alongside the Coney dog and the Boston cooler as one of the Motor City's iconic foods. Not bad for a pizza born in a corner bar and baked in borrowed factory pans. Every crispy, cheesy corner slice is a little piece of Detroit history — built on resourcefulness, perfected over generations, and finally getting the national love it always deserved.

Bring the Square Home

You don't have to track down a sit-down spot to enjoy the real thing. We're proud to stock frozen Detroit-style pizza from two of the names that built this legacy — Buddy's Pizza and Buscemi's — so you can pull a piece of Motor City history straight from your own oven.

These obviously aren’t newcomers, with a combined history of 150 years! Between them, that's a long time of doing this the right way — caramelized cheese edges, airy crust, and all.

Grab a frozen pie on your next visit and have those crispy corner slices ready whenever the craving hits. It's the easiest way to get authentic Detroit-style pizza, with the convenience of taking it home.

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