I have two votes. The first is New York. My husband and daughter were in New York yesterday and had it, I was sorry I missed it, but at least they brought home bagels. I’d have to say my favorite though, is boardwalk pizza, specifically from formerly Mac and Manco’s, now just Macs in Ocean City, NJ. Don’t ask me what it is, but if I could order it online to be shipped to me, I’d eat it every week, I love it.
Does the garbage plate make it as far as Ithaca? Our son is in school there, and it sounds interesting. Genny Cream I first had several decades ago.
Next year, there will be a day that gets down to -40° (C or F). You have not experienced that yet. What will you do?
40 below? I’ll be off to the rodeo!
I’ll never forget a 6 hour drive to DC from NYC with 2 big pizzas for a friend who requested NY pizza.
Yes! I see people leaving the crust rims of really good pizza on their plates and think, don’t they realize how good it is?
I’ve had the New Haven white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s and it was very good. (I love white clam sauce!) But I’ve had better pizza in NYC. As for Chicago, I’ve had pizza there a couple of times and it was just ok.
[quote=“bobot, post:144, topic:829096”]
40 below? I’ll be off to the rodeo!
[/QUOTE]Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there! Excellent! I heard the next line in my head as I read “40 below” too!
Little Rock - Shotgun Dans Pizza, US Pizza Company, and DamnGoode Pies.
All three make great Pizza. Shotgun Dans is my favorite because they don’t use a lot of sauce.
The other restaurants are more tomato based pizzas.
I’ll concur with a previous poster that Detroit-style pizza is hardly in the majority in the Detroit area - you have to go to very specific places to get it.
The largest chain and the one that started it all is Buddy’s, with about a dozen locations, though some are carry-out only. Some say that the very best pizza is from the original location at McNichols and Conant, which at least a few years ago was an absolutely terrible neighborhood and there was a security guard outside to watch the parking lot. Detroit’s gotten better since then, but that’s mainly downtown from what I understand, and McNichols is also called 6 Mile, so it’s quite a few miles north of the baseline. The place is probably still on an island of blight.
One other place I know of that is in their pedigree is Loui’s which is in Hazel Park on Dequindre north of 9 mile. Basically 3 miles north of the original Buddy’s and a mile west. It’s north of 8 mile, so it’s not nearly as blighted.
The closest thing to a national chain that serves something resembling Buddy’s style pizza is Jet’s. They’re slowly expanding nationwide, but you can’t get it on either coast except in Florida. I get their deep dish bread just about every week, as it has the same sort of crust profile that Buddy’s does, although their sauce and cheese are inferior and so I try to maximize the good crust by not having it prepared like a pizza.
Supposedly Little Caesar’s offers a Detroit-style pizza now, but I’ve never had it and wouldn’t trust anything made by them. The same with Domino’s. Those are not Detroit-style pizza as it’s come to be called; they are just national fast food pizza joints. I think “Buddy’s style” is a much better name, since it’s more indicative of where it came from and using only a regional modifier when two crappy chains started in the same region is grossly misleading.
Chicago-style deep dish is pretty good too, and in fact if I wanted pizza right now I much prefer it over Buddy’s style simply because I’ve had my Jet’s deep dish bread recently and can’t really stand the thought of more of it for another week, while Chicago-style is quite different.
I’ve never had New York or any other style. I’m not much of a food explorer.
Omaha NE: Old school Little Italy pizza is at Orsi’s bakery 7th and Pierce (opened 1919) Sicilian style at Sortino’s on L street. La Casa on Leavenworth is thin crust with shredded Romano rather than Mozzerella. Big Fred’s, once the best pizza in town, has turned to crap after a change in management. The Pizza at Wild WIllie’s was great. Willie sold franchises and it became Godfather’s. The chain pizza sucks. Wild Willie’s pizza was amazing.
Hardly any west-coast entries here, so let me give a report about Seattle, where I lived for nearly two decades, until mid 2016:
There’s Pagliacci’s, a local chain for gourmet, thin-crust pizza. Pricey, but pretty much the go-to place for Seattle-ites.
But my favorites were the Greek-style pizza places. Spiros, Romeo’s (yes), etc. Thick crust, golden, crispy cheese on top…unbelievable.
Currently I live in West Lafayette, IN and here, the best place is also Greek, called…“Greek’s Pizzeria.” Medium-thick crust with butter and garlic, sweet sauce, heavy on the cheese.
Being a college town just a couple of hours from Chicago, you’d expect a Chicago-style pizza place, but sadly there isn’t any. However, other than Chicago-style, there is a fairly wide variety of styles available, including square cut, specialty crust, then the usual national chain brands like Dominoes, Pizza Hut, and yeah, also Little Caesar’s (shudder).
Jet’s. Yes, we have one in Lafayette. I like them because their pre-cut, rectangular, deep-dish slices remind me of Rocky Rococco’s, my favorite place growing up in Madison. They were FANTASTIC in the late 70’s / early 80’s.
I keep hearing about Detroit-style but don’t know what that is. Could it be the same thing as I just described? (Jet’s / Rocky’s?)
Jet’s deep dish is Detroit-style. Detroit-style is a thick, Sicilian type of pizza cooked in a square or rectangular pan (I believe the roots of this pan is a shop pan for car parts or something like that–there is some kind of auto industry lore in there.) It also has a crispy bottom, as it’s cooked in a well-oiled pan. I don’t know if Jet’s does this, but Buddy’s pizza also has caramelized, almost blackened, cheese on the edge of the crust, and is topped with Wisconsin brick cheese instead of mozzarella (and I believe there’s white cheddar in there, too, but I don’t remember for certain.) Sauce is usually applied on top, over the cheese.
It’s a delicious style of pizza. I don’t generally like thick crusted pizza, but Buddy’s does it right. Despite being a thick crust, there’s a certain lightness to it, and the crisp fried bottom of it just makes it sing. I’ve been meaning to try Jet’s, as it’s here in Chicago, too, but never got a chance. Every time I go near Detroit, I try to stop at Buddy’s (the one at McNichols and Conant. It never even registered to me that it was a particularly bad neighborhood. I mean, yeah, it looks a bit sketch, but nothing that out of the ordinary.)
ETA: Looking online, it does seem some people characterize Rocky Rococo as Detroit-style. I’ve never had their pizza, though I have heard of it.
I think about 25% of my diet when I went to the UW in the '80s was Rocky Rococo pizza. When I head up to see my parents in Wisconsin, I try to arrange my drive so i can stop at the Rocky’s in Kenosha for a slice. I won’t pretend that it’s great pizza, but the nostalgia level is high.
Jet’s falls short on both of these, but it’s still damned good “fast food” pizza.
Buddy’s get the credit, but one might argue that Cloverleaf is a contender, since they had the same owner. Gus Guerra sold off Buddy’s to start Cloverleaf, which didn’t become a chain. I think there are/were some Cloverleaf take-out-only franchises for a bit, but the one I tried several years ago sucked.
I started my journey to making my own about seven years ago.
Oh, yeah. That looks legit. 
Oh, I read down to your post about the crust ring not being burnt, despite appearance, but rather “pure awesome.” This is correct! There’s a couple places (Pequod’s, Burt’s) here in Chicago that involved local pizza guru, the late Burt Katz, that also serverd a deep dish pan pizza with a blackened cheese crust. And I mean, it can sometimes look charred. But it never was. It was concentrated, cheesy umami awesomeness. I always wondered whether he got the idea from Buddy’s or if it was something he stumbled upon himself.
I was flipping through the TV a couple months ago, and PBS had America’s Test Kitchen(or maybe the clone with the same people) that was showing how to make a Detroit style pizza at home. I never tried their method , but they are usually pretty good at those kind of things.
Cooks’ Country. Not quite as pretty as Balthisar’s, but reasonable. That is a good style to make at home. I"ve made lots of thin crusts at home, and they come out well, but none of them taste like my favorite local pizzerias. The thicker styles like Detroit or Old Forge (which I posted earlier) can almost be dead ringers in a home oven.
I’ve been told that Ledo’s pizza might be similar to the cracker-crust, square-cut pizza I’m missing from the midwest. I’ll have to try it. It doesn’t have any locations that are very convenient to me and I don’t know whether they deliver.
Hmmm. Ledo’s is my favorite local pizza place here in suburban Chicago (and that does sound like their style of pizza), but it’s not a chain, at all – it’s one family-owned place in the west suburbs. I’m now wondering if there’s another one out there with a similar name.