Everyone knows New York style pizza with its floppy, oversized slices or Chicago’s legendary deep dish pie. Those names have traveled far beyond their city limits, becoming global icons of American pizza culture. Still, if you really want to understand how pizza evolved in America, you need to dig deeper. There are regional styles scattered across the country that never made it to the mainstream consciousness, tucked away in small towns and industrial cities where locals fiercely guard their traditions.
Roughly thirteen percent of the United States population consumes pizza on any given day, which makes the survival of these obscure regional styles all the more remarkable. Here’s the thing: the pizza I’m about to introduce you to won’t be found on every corner. Some of them embrace controversial ingredients, others flip the entire pizza-making process upside down. What they all share is a devoted local following and a story rooted in immigrant innovation and working-class ingenuity.
Detroit-Style Pizza: The Square That Changed Everything
Detroit-style pizza was originally baked in rectangular steel trays designed for use as automotive drip pans or to hold small industrial parts in factories, developed during the mid-20th century in Detroit, Michigan. Think about that for a second. Factory workers repurposed industrial equipment to make pizza, and that ingenuity created something genuinely special. The style was developed in 1946 at Buddy’s Rendezvous, a former speakeasy owned by Gus and Anna Guerra, though the origins are slightly debated.
What sets this pizza apart isn’t just its shape. The cheese is spread to the edges and caramelizes against the high-sided heavyweight rectangular pan, giving the crust a lacy, crispy edge known as frico. That caramelized cheese corner is what people travel for. I know it sounds almost too simple, yet the texture and flavor are unlike anything else in the pizza world.
Pepperoni is sometimes placed directly on the crust with cooked sauce optionally as the final layer, applied in dollops or in “racing stripes”, sometimes referred to as “red top” because the sauce is the final topping. The backwards layering structure isn’t just for show. The pepperoni flavors seep into the thick, airy crust while the sauce stays bright and fresh on top. At the 2012 International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas, Shawn Randazzo won the title of “World Champion Pizza Maker of the Year” with Detroit-style pizza, marking the first time ever it was Detroit-style pizza.
Before 2012, Detroit-style pizza was a hyper-local delicacy, mostly unknown outside Michigan. Now you’ll see it popping up in cities nationwide, though purists insist nothing beats the original spots in the Motor City.
St. Louis-Style Pizza: The Cracker Crust That Divides America
Let’s be real, St. Louis-style pizza is polarizing. The pizza typically has a thin cracker-like crust made without yeast, topped with sweet tomato sauce, cut into squares or rectangles rather than wedges, and topped with provel cheese. That crust is impossibly thin, closer to a saltine cracker than traditional pizza dough. People either adore it or can’t stand it.
The real controversy comes from the cheese. Provel is a white processed cheese prominent in St. Louis cuisine, a combination of cheddar, Swiss, provolone, and liquid smoke with a low melting point, a gooey texture, and a buttery flavor. Provel was purportedly invented for St. Louis–style pizza in the 1940s by Costa Grocery in collaboration with Hoffman Dairy of Wisconsin. It was specifically engineered for pizza.
Provel is rarely used or sold outside of St. Louis, which means if you want authentic St. Louis pizza elsewhere, you’re mostly out of luck. The cheese doesn’t stretch like mozzarella. Instead, Provel cheese was invented specifically as a pizza cheese, offering a “clean bite” in contrast to the gooey, stretchy, sinewy experience of your typical ‘za. Honestly, it’s an acquired taste that locals seem to inherit from birth.
Instead of larger pie-like wedges seen in other pizza styles, it is cut into three- or four-inch squares, referred to as a party cut or tavern cut, and it has been suggested that the square cut was inspired by Ed Imo’s former profession as a tile-layer. Picture-perfect St. Louis-style pizza can be found at the city’s renowned Imo’s Pizza, which has been going strong for nearly 60 years. The sweet tomato sauce paired with that crackling crust creates an experience that feels almost nacho-like, as some critics have suggested. Whether that’s a compliment or insult depends entirely on who you ask.
New Haven Apizza: Connecticut’s Coal-Fired Secret
Frank Pepe established “Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana” on June 16, 1925, at 163 Wooster Street, originating the New Haven-style thin-crust apizza, closely related to Neapolitan-style Italian pizza, which he baked in a coal-fired brick pizza oven. The locals pronounce it “ah-beetz,” and if you mispronounce it, they’ll know you’re not from around there. New Haven takes its pizza seriously.
New Haven-style pizza has a thin crust that varies between chewy and tender, baked in coal-fired brick ovens till charred, and also known as “apizza” it has tomato sauce and only grated Pecorino Romano cheese with mozzarella considered a topping. That charred, almost burnt crust gives the pizza a smoky complexity that gas ovens simply can’t replicate. The oven bakes pizzas at 650 °F, but the temperature of the coals can exceed 1,000 °F.
New Haven pizza parlors are beloved for putting out pizzas topped with white clams, a style that was invented by New Haven pizza stalwart Frank Pepe in the 1920s to take advantage of the local bounty of seafood, and these days you’ll find these pies, also made with grated aged cheese and garlic, at most local pizza shops, and apizza is always cooked in a coal oven for a smoky, charred crust. The white clam pizza has become almost as famous as the traditional tomato pie.
In 2025, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana marks the 100th anniversary, and as one of the oldest pizza chains in America and one of the first in New Haven, Frank Pepe’s has been nationally ranked for its New Haven-style crispy-crusted tomato pies. A century of pizza-making tradition, still using the same methods, same ovens, same recipes. The consistency is what keeps people coming back generation after generation.
