The Best Pizza in Detroit
Detroit invented a style. These are the places still doing it right, plus the ones doing something else entirely.
Detroit-style pizza is on menus in Brooklyn, Austin, Los Angeles, and a dozen other cities that learned about blue steel pans from Instagram. The style went national. Then it went international. And the city where it started is still the best place to eat it.
But Detroit's pizza story is not just one style. The city that invented the rectangle also has thin-crust pizzerias, wood-fired ovens in Midtown, and neighborhood spots that have been making pies for decades. This guide focuses on restaurants with documented history or current menu information to support a useful starting point.1This is not a comprehensive list of every pizza restaurant in metro Detroit. It is a focused guide to the places I know well enough to recommend with confidence. If your favorite spot is missing, it may mean I haven't been yet.
The Style That Started Here
You cannot write about pizza in Detroit without starting with the pan.
Detroit-style pizza is baked in a blue steel pan. The dough is high-hydration, pressed into the oiled pan and proofed until it fills every corner. Wisconsin brick cheese gets pushed all the way to the edges, where it melts down the sides and fries against the hot metal. The result is the frico edge: crispy, lacey, salty, slightly bitter from caramelization. Tomato sauce goes on top in stripes after the pizza comes out of the oven. The layers stay distinct. You taste crust, cheese, and sauce separately in every bite.
That is the template. Here is where to eat it.
Buddy's Pizza
17125 Conant St, Detroit (original location; multiple metro Detroit locations)
Buddy's is widely credited as the originator of Detroit-style pizza, and the original Conant Street location is where that credit points. Whether every detail of the founding story holds up, the pizza is not in dispute.
The Detroiter pairs pepperoni with Buddy's familiar racing stripes of tomato sauce. The restaurant's square format creates corner pieces with two cheese edges and a softer, more bread-forward center. Check the current menu and location before traveling, since offerings and hours vary by shop.
The Veggie (green peppers, onions, mushrooms, black olives, tomatoes) makes a different case for the style. The thick dough absorbs the moisture from the vegetables instead of going soggy. The mushrooms brown on top, the onions caramelize into the cheese layer. If the style holds up without pepperoni, the style is doing real work. It does.
Buddy's has multiple locations across metro Detroit. The Conant Street original has the history. Any location will give you the pizza.2We covered Buddy's in depth as the fourth entry in The Slice, our ongoing pizza series. That piece goes deeper on the pan, the dough, and the frico edge.
Order this: The Detroiter pepperoni. Corner pieces mandatory.
Supino Pizzeria
2457 Russell St, Eastern Market, Detroit
Supino is not Detroit-style. Dave Mancini has been making New York-style thin-crust pizza at 2457 Russell Street since 2008, and his presence on this list is the reason the guide is called "Best Pizza in Detroit" and not "Best Detroit-Style Pizza."
The crust folds cleanly along the center. The char is even. The dough has been stretched by the same hands (or hands trained by those hands) thousands of times, and you can taste the consistency. This is pizza as repetition refined into something approaching craft.
The margherita is the benchmark. San Marzano tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil. The sauce is bright and acidic enough to balance the richness of the cheese. No extra cheese piled on to mask the technique. One slice tells you everything about the kitchen.
The white pizza with arugula and lemon is a useful counterpoint to a red-sauce pie: olive oil and garlic on the crust, mozzarella, then arugula and lemon after the bake. The greens and acidity keep the thin crust from reading as heavy.
On Saturdays, when Eastern Market is running, the line at Supino stretches toward the market sheds. People plan their market mornings around getting a pie here. On a quiet Tuesday, you walk right in. Either way, the pizza comes out the same.
A whole pizza runs somewhere between $14 and $20 depending on size and toppings. For the quality, Supino is among the best values in the city.
Order this: The white pizza with arugula and lemon. Then the margherita, because you should.
Beyond What We Track
Buddy's and Supino are the two Detroit pizza restaurants this publication covers in depth, with full profiles and series entries. Detroit's pizza landscape extends well beyond two names. A few additional places belong in the conversation.
Loui's Pizza
Loui's, in Hazel Park, is one of the names that comes up whenever Detroit pizza regulars argue about who does it best. The style sits in the same pan tradition as Buddy's, with reported differences in crust and cheese blend. It needs a dedicated visit and current menu check before a full recommendation.3Loui's Pizza is at 23141 Dequindre Rd, Hazel Park. Technically outside Detroit proper, but close enough that excluding it from a Detroit pizza guide would be dishonest.
Shields Pizza
Shields is another name in the Detroit-style lineage. We have not covered it here.
The Broader Landscape
Michigan and Main, a pizza spot in the Avenue of Fashion neighborhood on Livernois, has been getting attention. Via 313, the Austin-based chain, built its reputation on Detroit-style pizza. Jolly Pumpkin's Midtown location, which ran a wood-fired pizza program alongside its sour beer at 441 W Canfield, closed in March 2026 after eleven years. The style that started here is being reinterpreted everywhere, including back home.
None of this diminishes Buddy's or Supino. If anything, the proliferation of Detroit-style pizza across the country makes the originals more interesting, not less. The copies work from the template. The source works from the ingredients.
Two Styles, One City
The useful thing about Detroit's pizza scene is that the city's two best-known pizzerias are doing completely different things.
Buddy's makes the case for the pan. Thick crust, frico edges, sauce on top, every bite a stack of distinct layers. The pizza is a construction. The pan does as much work as the baker.
Supino makes the case for the hand. Thin crust, clean fold, ingredients that you can taste individually because there is nowhere for them to hide. The pizza is a surface. The dough does all the work.
Both are correct. Both have been at it long enough that the correctness is backed by years of doing the same thing until it became instinct.
For a first Detroit pizza itinerary, Buddy's offers the canonical square pan and Supino offers a thin-crust Eastern Market counterpoint. The two formats make the city's range legible without pretending they are the same style.
Travel time from Ann Arbor varies with traffic; verify hours and route before attempting both stops in one trip.
See also: The Slice: Detroit-Style Pizza for our in-depth Buddy's review, Supino Pizzeria profile, and our broader Where to Eat in Detroit guide.