From left, top: Johnny Z's (St. Clair Shores), Orleans Sports Cafe (Mount Clemens), Chubby Charlie's (Clarkston, Waterford, Roseville), J's Penalty Box (Ferndale)
Bottom: Saucy Brew Works (Detroit), Detroit Pizza Factory (Dearborn Heights), Shorty Bell's, last two (Detroit)
Out with pepperoni, in with pickles.
Dill slices are a popular pizza topping throughout Metro Detroit -- an oddity Melody Baetens reports on at The Detroit News with a roundup of 12 spots baking that choice. A playful headline asks: "What's the big dill?"
"We put it on the menu because so many of our customers were asking about it," co-owner Michelle Robertson of Johnny Z's Pizzeria in St. Clair Shores tells the paper. "It's a pretty big seller ... maybe our third-most popular pizza."
While some places do offer pickles as a topping for a standard red-sauce pizza, most sell it as a specialty item without tomato sauce.
J's Penalty Box in Ferndale (Photo: Facebook)
Chubby Charlie's in Clarkston, Waterford and Roseville "is laying claim to being the home of the original pickle pizza," according to the article. Elsewhere, Jay's Penalty Box boasts of serving "Ferndale's original pickle pizza."
At Slice of the 80's pizzerias in Westland and Livonia, "radical toppings and bodacious specialty pizzas [include] the pickle pizza with mozzarella cheese and sliced pickles atop a white garlic pizza sauce," Baetens writes. Sherwood Brewing Company in Shelby Township has "a garlic-y dill pickle pizza as well as dill pickle pizza rolls, which is a blend of cheeses and Maceri pickle chips rolled into dough and creamy pesto sauce for dipping."
See the full rundown of pickle pie places in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb.
