HEMI PIZZAEvery great pizza style has a birthplace. New York has its coal-fired corner slice. Naples has its wood-fired Margherita. And Detroit — the Motor City — gave the world a square, deep, crispy-edged pizza that started in the back of a neighborhood tavern in 1946.
It started at Buddy’s Rondinelli — 1946
The generally accepted birthplace of Detroit-style pizza is Buddy’s Rondinelli, a tavern on the corner of Six Mile and Conant on Detroit’s east side. The story credits Gus Guerra, who wanted to add something to the bar menu and reached for a Sicilian recipe — a thick, focaccia-like sfincione said to have come from his wife Anna’s family.
That Sicilian square was the seed. But what turned it into something entirely new wasn’t the dough. It was the pan.
The pan came off the factory floor
This is Detroit in the 1940s — the beating heart of the American auto industry. The kitchen didn’t have fancy pizza pans, so they used what the city had plenty of: heavy-gauge blue steel utility trays from the automotive plants, the kind used to hold small parts and drip oil.
Those industrial pans changed everything. The thick steel held and radiated heat, the deep sidewalls let the dough rise tall and airy, and — most importantly — the cheese pushed all the way to the edge could fry against the hot metal. That’s the whole trick.
Detroit-style pizza isn’t defined by a recipe. It’s defined by a pan — and what the cheese does when it hits the edge of that pan.
The signature: crispy cheese corners
Because the cheese runs wall-to-wall, it caramelizes against the steel into a lacy, crunchy, deeply browned edge called frico. Every square gets a corner. The corners are the most fought-over pieces on the table — crispy, chewy, and impossibly savory.
The other tell: the sauce goes on top of the cheese, ladled in two or three stripes after baking (some shops call them “racing stripes”). Putting the sauce on top instead of under the cheese keeps the crust from going soggy and lets that thick cheese layer melt straight onto the dough.
From a Detroit tavern to a national obsession
For decades, Detroit-style stayed a hometown secret — something you had to drive to the Motor City to eat. It wasn’t until the 2010s that it exploded nationally, as a new generation of pizzaiolos rediscovered the seasoned steel pans, the airy crumb, and those addictive frico edges. Today it’s on “best pizza in America” lists coast to coast.
How HEMI carries the tradition to Rockville
At HEMI Pizza in Rockville, MD, we build every pie the Detroit way — in classic 8"×10" black steel pans, cheese pushed to every edge for real frico corners, and HEMI tomato sauce striped over the top. It’s the 1946 blueprint, run by seafood chefs who don’t cut corners on ingredients.
Want to understand what makes those crispy edges possible? It comes down to the cheese — read What Is Brick Cheese? next, or see why Detroit-style beats the rest.