The Slice: Mani Osteria's Wood-Fired Pizza
The first entry in our Best Pizza series comes from a pasta restaurant. That tells you something.
The first entry in our Best Pizza in Ann Arbor series comes from a restaurant that most people think of as a pasta place. That's fair. Mani Osteria makes its pasta by hand every day, and the pappardelle with short rib ragu is one of the most reliable dishes in downtown Ann Arbor. But there's a wood-fired oven in that kitchen at 341 East Liberty Street, and I keep going back for what comes out of it.
The Oven
Mani's pizza oven runs hot enough to blister the crust in the spots that matter. The charring isn't uniform — it's the leopard-spotted pattern that tells you the dough had time to ferment and the oven had time to heat. This isn't a conveyor belt operation. Each pizza goes in, gets rotated, and comes out when the crust says it's ready. That sounds obvious. It is not the norm.
The Margherita
Every entry in The Slice starts with the margherita. I ordered it here on a Tuesday evening when the restaurant was half full and the kitchen was moving at its own pace. San Marzano tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, and olive oil on a thin, blistered crust. No extra toppings to complicate the evaluation. No additional cheese to mask the technique.
The sauce is bright without being acidic. It's cooked enough to mellow but raw enough to taste like tomatoes. The mozzarella melts into pools that stretch when you pull a slice — not the pre-shredded, even-coverage melt of a lesser pizza, but the organic, slightly uneven distribution of hand-torn cheese.
The crust has structure. You can pick up a slice without it folding over, but it's not rigid. There's give. There's chew. The cornicione — the raised edge — puffs with air pockets from the fermentation, and it's seasoned enough that you'd eat it on its own. At too many restaurants, the crust edge is the part people leave on the plate. At Mani, it's the part that tells you whether the kitchen is paying attention. This kitchen is paying attention.
Beyond the Margherita
The seasonal pizzas rotate, and they're where the kitchen takes risks that the pasta menu doesn't. The spring menu has featured morel mushrooms with fontina and thyme — three ingredients on a pizza, and the morels come through clean. Overloading the pie would have buried them. Mani didn't.
I ordered the soppressata pizza on my second visit. Spicy Italian salami, San Marzano, mozzarella. The fat from the soppressata renders in the oven and pools in orange circles on the cheese. Salt, fat, heat, all pulling in the same direction. I drank a glass of the house Montepulciano with it and stopped thinking about the pasta menu entirely.
Where This Ranks
Mani Osteria's pizza is the wood-fired benchmark for this series. The crust is excellent. The toppings are restrained. The margherita passes the test with room to spare. This is the pizza against which we'll measure every other wood-fired entry in The Slice.
It exists inside a restaurant known for pasta, which means most people walk past the pizza section of the menu. That's a mistake. The wood-fired oven at Mani is doing some of the best work on East Liberty, and East Liberty is not a street that lacks for competition.
The Slice verdict: Strong first entry. The margherita sets the bar. The seasonal rotations keep it interesting. Order the pizza.
This is part of The Slice: Best Pizza in Ann Arbor, our ongoing series.