The Slice: Mid-Series Rankings
Five pizzerias in. Two styles evaluated. One ranking that's going to upset someone.
Five entries in. Time to rank them.
The Slice started as a simple question: who makes the best pizza in Ann Arbor? Five entries later, the question has complicated itself in the way good questions do. The series has covered wood-fired Neapolitan, New York-style thin crust, sour-brewery wood-fired, Detroit-style deep pan, and a high-volume delivery kitchen that has been feeding Ann Arbor at 2 a.m. for decades. They are not playing the same game. Ranking them requires deciding what the game is.
Here is how I am calling it after five entries. This is a mid-series ranking. It will change.
The Criteria
Every entry in The Slice gets judged on the same things: crust quality, sauce balance, cheese ratio and melt, overall composition, and whether you would come back and pay full price. Every entry also gets the margherita test where the restaurant makes one, because a margherita is where a kitchen cannot hide.
Detroit-style gets an adjusted margherita test because no one orders a Buddy's margherita; the benchmark shifts to the Detroiter pepperoni, which is the actual canonical pizza. Pizza House gets a delivery test because its whole argument is the transit. The criteria flex at the edges to fit the category. The core question does not: would you order it again, and would it be worth it?
1. Mani Osteria
341 East Liberty St, Ann Arbor. The wood-fired oven at Mani runs hot enough to produce the leopard-spotted blister pattern that tells you the dough had real fermentation time and the kitchen knew what to do with it. The margherita set the benchmark for the series on day one: San Marzano tomatoes bright enough to taste like tomatoes, hand-torn mozzarella that pools rather than melts flat, a cornicione with air pockets you can eat on its own. The crust carries the pizza, and the crust is excellent.
Mani sits inside a restaurant known for pasta, which means the pizza section of the menu is chronically underordered. That remains the most reliable mistake in downtown Ann Arbor. Read the full entry.
2. Supino Pizzeria
2457 Russell St, Detroit. Supino could move up to first and I would not argue with you for long. Seventeen years of the same dough, the same fold, the same small storefront in Eastern Market. The margherita folds cleanly. The sauce punches with tomato acidity in a way that fits a thinner crust that needs a brighter partner. The white pizza with arugula and lemon is still the most elegant single pizza in this series: olive oil and garlic under the cheese, a full handful of arugula laid on after the oven, lemon that actually registers as a flavor because there is enough arugula for it to cling to.
The thing that keeps Supino at two is the drive. Forty minutes each way on I-94 is a real cost. But that drive is worth it, and a series that only considers the city limits is not asking honest questions. Read the full entry.
3. Jolly Pumpkin, Dexter
2319 Bishop Circle East, Dexter. The brewery argument. Chef Maggie Long runs a wood-fired kitchen that declines to operate like a side hustle, and the Pumpkin Poblano is the most creative single pizza in the series: roasted pumpkin, poblano peppers, smoked mozzarella, calabrian chile oil, four toppings that have no business working together until they do. The margherita on its own is solid, not spectacular. With a Bam Biere beside it, the combination is better than either half.
The pairing is the point, and that is either Jolly Pumpkin's strongest argument or the reason some readers will put it lower than third. If you think a pizza should stand on its own without a drink to complete it, the Dexter wood-fired stays at three. If you think the beer program is part of the pizza experience, it could be one. That argument is still alive. Read the full entry.
4. Buddy's Pizza (Detroit-Style)
Conant Street, Detroit. Buddy's is the benchmark for a style that started here and went national, and that counts for something the other entries cannot claim. The frico edge is the defining feature of Detroit-style pizza: Wisconsin brick cheese pushed to the edge of a blue steel pan, where it caramelizes against the hot metal into something crispy, lacey, slightly bitter, and immediately recognizable. The corner pieces are the whole argument, two frico edges instead of one, with a dough that is thick and airy enough to hold up under the weight of everything on top of it.
The fourth-place position is not a criticism of the pizza. It is an acknowledgment that the criteria for Detroit-style and the criteria for Neapolitan wood-fired are different enough that the ranking involves a judgment call, not a clear technical winner. Buddy's wins the category it invented. Read the full entry.
5. Pizza House
618 Church St, Ann Arbor. Pizza House is last on the craft ceiling and first on everything else that matters at midnight. The deep dish crust holds through delivery in a way that deep dish from a lesser kitchen does not: no soggy bottom, no separated cheese, no structural failure at the center. It arrives hot. It arrives intact. It is available until 3 a.m. on weekends. No other entry in this series is doing that job.
The ranking is honest about what the series is measuring and what it is not. Pizza House is below Mani on refinement. Pizza House is above every other entry in the series on reliability, accessibility, and the specific category of pizza that you eat at 1 a.m. in February. Those are not the same criteria, and both matter. Read the full entry.
What Would Change the Rankings
Mani holds the top spot because the crust is the best in the series and the margherita is the clearest benchmark. The thing that could move it: a seasonal rotation that misses. The wood-fired toppings have been restrained and correct. An overloaded or underconceived pizza would not move Mani out of the top three, but it would open a conversation.
Supino at two is the most debatable position. The white pizza with arugula and lemon is the most polished single pizza in the series, and if the ranking were based on a single best pizza rather than overall program, Supino might be first. The forty-minute drive is the only thing holding the argument back.
Jolly Pumpkin at three could move to two if the argument about pairing versus standalone pizza resolves in the pairing's favor. The Pumpkin Poblano is doing something the other entries are not even attempting. If the series ends up valuing originality and context as primary criteria, Jolly Pumpkin moves up.
Buddy's at four has an argument for three: the style origination matters, the frico edge is genuinely distinctive, and no other entry has a corner piece. The case against moving it up is that the criteria are supposed to apply across styles, and a Detroit-style pizza competing on its own terms is not the same as a Detroit-style pizza that is better than a wood-fired Neapolitan by the same measures.
Pizza House at five could not move up in the current ranking without the criteria changing. Under different criteria, the delivery window alone would put it first. The series does not rank by accessibility, so it stays fifth.
What the Series Still Needs to Settle
The Slice has not yet evaluated its most interesting outlier. Silvio's Organic Pizza on North University is the argument that ingredient philosophy precedes oven tradition: whole-grain organic crust with a nuttiness and weight that white-flour pizza does not have. The current ranking is built entirely on conventional pizza traditions, and Silvio's will test whether the criteria hold when the base material is different. If the whole-grain crust is genuinely good, it opens up a new dimension in the ranking. If it is not, the series will know something it does not know now.
More entries will follow after Silvio's. The list is not finished, and the ranking will move as it grows.
Come Disagree
The case for Supino at one is strong. The case for Jolly Pumpkin at two is credible. The case for Buddy's anywhere but fourth will require convincing me that the criteria are wrong, not just that the pizza is good.
Tell us where you think we're wrong.
Read the full series tracker: The Slice: Best Pizza in Ann Arbor.