Learn how to make your own Detroit-style pizza with this cookbook

Few trends have dominated the pizza world over the past decade more than the rise of Detroit-style pizza.

And one of the leaders of that shift in the Bay Area? Mr. Square Pie Guy himself, Marc Schechter, who founded the growing Detroit-style pizzeria chain Square Pie Guys while living in Berkeley.

Detroit-style pizza, characterized by its thick crust, the “frico” or caramelized crispy cheese crown that forms against the sides of the pan, and red sauce, is said to have been invented by Gus Guerra and his wife, Anna, in the 1940s after they repurposed thick steel pans that had been used for spare parts in the auto industry for baking the rectangular pies. Its identity is distinct from New York-style pizza, which generally has a thin crust that is soft on the bottom and crispy on the edges and can be folded to eat.

Since opening the first location in 2019, Square Pie Guys has expanded to six locations around the Bay Area, with a seventh slated to open in early 2027 in Mill Valley.

Schechter, a self-taught pizza chef, has teamed up with chef and author Gabi Moskowitz, and their forthcoming cookbook “Square Pie Guy: Detroit-Style Pizza at Home” (Weldon Owen, $35) is set to be released Oct. 27. Moskowitz’s 2008 blog, Brokeass Gourmet, inspired the Freeform comedy “Young & Hungry,” which she co-produced. The show, loosely inspired by Moskowitz’s life and writing, ran from 2014 to 2018 and was about the travails of a young, financially struggling chef and food blogger.

We recently caught up with Schechter to hear more about his journey.

Marc Schechter is founder of Square Pie Guys and author of the forthcoming “Square Pie Guy” cookbook. (Courtesy of Marcell Turner) 

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You were living in the Bay Area when you got into making Detroit-style pizza? Tell me how that happened.

A: It all started in 2016 when I started making pizza in my house in Berkeley as a hobby. I was inspired by my friend Jeff Newman, who was the chef de cuisine at Cotogna (in San Francisco). He gave me a pizza cookbook, a pizza peel and a pizza stone, and basically said, “I don’t think you can make great pizza at home. … But go knock yourself out, Mr. Hobbyist.” So I did. And I really fell in love with doing that.

I started doing dinner parties, and the next year, in 2017, I started doing meals with Feastly (a pop-up dining marketplace). I didn’t really have any credentials or any licenses or insurance, but I did anything I could do that had a low barrier to entry to keep accelerating my journey. At some point, I asked that same friend if he would open a restaurant with me, and he said, “No, you’re crazy. You have no background.” He casually threw out, “Go see if you can even work in a restaurant.”

I started to apply to different restaurants and spent one night staging at a place in Orinda, which was sort of hilarious and discouraging all at once. But I kept going, and eventually Pizza Hacker in Bernal Heights hired me and brought me into their restaurant. I was very inexperienced, and they put me on the salad station, and then I worked my way over to the pizza station. Eventually, they let me go run their Wednesday and Thursday outpost at a place called Vinyl Wine Bar in San Francisco.

That became my own pop-up. At the same time, I started working at Pizzeria Delfina in Burlingame, and that’s where I really learned about the restaurant business, got some more formal training and got a lot of reps working on the pizza line. My pizza skills went from zero to master level pretty fast working at Delfina and doing the pop-up. All the while, I had my day job.

I started playing around with Grandma-style, Sicilian-style, Detroit-style and all the pan pizzas around that same time. My friend’s fiancée at the time made fun of me when I would post a square pizza on Instagram, so I created the Instagram handle Square Pie Guy.

Square Pie Guys founder Marc Schechter holds a plate of Spicy Pepperoni pizza in the dining room of his Walnut Creek restaurant on Sept. 22, 2026. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group) 

Q: How did you build beyond pop-ups?

A: About six months into doing my pop-ups at the wine bar, this couple wanted to do their wedding there. At the time, I was doing New York-style pizzas for that pop-up and had just sold out, but had a couple experimental Detroit-style pizzas available for them to taste. I gave them some, and they loved that more than the New York style.

At the time, I only had three pizza pans, and expected to need 30 to 40 for the wedding. They told me to just include it in the quote. That wedding bought the first 40 pans for Square Pie Guys.

Square Pie Guys founder Marc Schechter makes Spicy Pepperoni pizza in his Walnut Creek restaurant on Sept. 22, 2026. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group) 

Q: What happened next?

A: In 2018, I partnered with Danny Stoller, and that’s when the pop-up really started to accelerate. We got written up in the (San Francisco) Chronicle during our pop-up era at the Vinyl Wine Bar, and then we found a location in SoMa. We had some investors lined up, we got some other investors involved, and we signed that lease and opened the first restaurant in July of 2019.

Right away, we saw that people were interested in getting our food delivered and doing takeout. So we planned for that as part of our business model from the very beginning. That benefited us immensely because when the pandemic hit, we had already built our whole process around being able to fulfill delivery orders and to-go orders.

A lot of restaurants had to do this huge shift in how they operate, whereas takeout and delivery were baked into what we did. That really helped us at the time, and then we found a lease in Oakland — our second location — in 2021. We then partnered with the previous landlords at Ghirardelli Square on another location, which opened in 2022.

At some point, Danny and I decided to part ways. And then we partnered with Local Kitchens in 2023 and 2024. We signed a couple of leases and last year got three stores open: Palo Alto, Walnut Creek and Campbell. And next year, we’re gonna get Mill Valley open. So we’ll have gone from a pop-up in 2019 to seven restaurants in early 2027.

The Spicy Pepperoni pizza is served at Square Pie Guys restaurant in Walnut Creek on Sept. 22, 2026. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group) 

Q: What happened with Local Kitchens? You took over the lease of the Palo Alto location where Local Kitchens had been, right?

A: They’ve significantly reduced their footprint, and that created an opportunity for us to take over some of those locations. The Palo Alto location was a former Local Kitchens location, and the Mill Valley location that we’re going to open up was a former Local Kitchens location.

Q: Why focus on Detroit-style pizza in the Bay Area?

A: I think there is always a place for good pizza. Detroit-style pizza is very popular, and it’s been around for a while now, but there are still people that come in and are discovering it.

Besides it being overall delicious in general, I think it actually is the best style of pizza for the current era of consumer behavior, in the sense that people are getting a lot of delivery still, and this type of pizza delivers better than most. It keeps the heat and the crispiness and looks good upon delivery.

Square Pie Guys founder Marc Schechter slides Spicy Pepperoni pizza out of a cooking pan and onto a cooling rack in his Walnut Creek restaurant on Sept. 22, 2026. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group) 

Q: Tell me a little bit about the cookbook. What inspired you to write it?

A: I’ve always firmly believed that you can make great pizza at home. If you look on social media now, all these creators make pizza in their home ovens and have content all about doing that.

I wanted to wave the flag for pan pizza and Detroit-style pizza and say this is also the best style of pizza to make at home. You can’t really make a halfway decent New York style on a sheet pan — not to get too nerdy about it — whereas you can do a pan pizza in a cast iron or other common household pans.

It certainly is something that takes a long time to get amazing at, but it’s not too hard to get into — and that’s one of the reasons I was able to get into this business and start Square Pie Guys. The only barrier to entry is having a mixing bowl, going to the grocery store, buying flour and yeast and salt, and using your hands. It’s not like Bitcoin mining or something; you don’t need millions of dollars of equipment.

The other reason was I met Gabi (Moskowitz) who is the co-author of the book. Gabi has a really cool history. She had a TV show and her own cookbooks and is just an amazing person. I curated a San Francisco pizza tour with Steve Dolinsky, a journalist who is also a huge pizza nerd and pizza personality in Chicago. After that tour, Gabi came to me and said, “Hey, I think this could be a great opportunity to write a book.”

You’ll find guidance on how to starting a sourdough starter in the pages of “Square Pie Guy,” a forthcoming cookbook on Detroit-style pizza by Marc Schechter and Gabi Moskowitz. It involves bread flour, water and patience. (Courtesy of Stacy Ventura) 

Q: What’s your connection to Tom Gozney and Gozney ovens? I saw he wrote the foreword.

A: The reason Tom Gozney wrote the foreword is that Gozney ovens were a key part of my journey into this business. There was a period when we used the Gozney oven to do pop-ups at Vinyl Wine Bar and at breweries like Black Hammer Brewing and Anchor Brewing, before it closed. Gozney and their competitor Ooni have created a whole new wave of pizza entrepreneurs that wouldn’t have existed beforehand. These ovens have lowered the barrier to entry, because in the past you’d have to be handy and know how to put together a brick mason oven and get it on a trailer — or buy one and buy a trailer, and that’s expensive and time-consuming.

Q: Tell me more about the recipes in your cookbook that are the result of collaborations with Bay Area personalities and public figures?

A: Those were all collaborations that ran on the actual Square Pie Guys menu. All those collabs have had a charitable component to them. (Former NBA player) Jeremy Lin, for example, has the Jeremy Lin Foundation, where he puts together programs and helps raise money for kids in East Palo Alto and other areas where they don’t have the deepest resources to compete with kids in wealthier areas. Sales of that pizza raised money towards his foundation.

To me, pizza is a blank canvas. You can pull from so many different culinary styles in terms of toppings. We partnered with The Bussdown (a former restaurant) in Oakland. The chefs had Afro-Caribbean roots, and we did a jerk chicken and spicy green sauce topping. It’s cool what you can do with the blank canvas of pizza and collaborators to promote it and to support good causes. That’s really what Square Pie Guys is all about.

Q: Anything else?

A: Don’t be afraid to make your own dough. It’s not as challenging as it seems. If you just weigh it all, you cannot mess it up. The rest is just time.

Details: “Square Pie Guy: Detroit-Style Pizza at Home,” by Marc Schechter and Gabi Moskowitz (Weldon Owen, $35) is out Oct. 27. Square Pie Guys has locations in Walnut Creek, Campbell, Palo Alto, Oakland and San Francisco. squarepieguys.com.

Recipes from ‘Square Pie Guy: Detroit-Style Pizza at Home’