Little Caesars' Detroit-Style Pizza Is Making Waves

Little Caesars is often celebrated for its extremely affordable Hot-N-Ready pizzas, which are indeed hot, ready, and cheap. But the Deep! Deep! pizzas on the other half of the menu are a quiet mainstay of its offerings. They're Detroit-style (Little Caesars is Detroit-based, after all), and for a limited-time-only, they're being offered at a steep discount. A large pepperoni deep dish is going for $8.99 as opposed to its usual $12.99.

There are a few reasons why these pizzas are particularly special. First of all, they're fired off in a steel pan, which gives the pizzas a unique, almost fried-like texture on the bottom. Then they're also topped edge-to-edge with cheese, which means some of it bakes down over the sides of the dough, creating a caramelized perimeter of cheese in the process. In this case, the crust becomes your reward, and it's something to be absolutely coveted.

The thing is, Detroit-style pizzas aren't cheap. A similar one-topping cheese-crusted beauty at Jet's will set me back a whopping $22.48, which is almost twice as much as Little Caesars normal price. Little Caesars offering isn't just a good one, it's an excellent one.

In a recent press release, Greg Hamilton, chief marketing officer at Little Caesars said, "The Detroit-Style Deep Dish is one of our favorite menu items because it's part of our history. Detroit-style pizza has become increasingly popular in the last few years."

Hamilton's not wrong. Hell, I made Detroit-style pizzas for a long time at a pizzeria here in Chicago, Paulie Gee's Logan Square, and after starting the style as a special, it became so popular that we ended up on best-of lists and added it to the roster permanently (and wore me out in the process). They aren't cheap, but they're totally worth the menu price for a specialty pizza.

But if you've never tried a Detroit-style pizza, Little Caesars might be the perfect entryway for you. With prices of everything going up and changing our dining-out habits, trying new things might feel a little out of reach. But at least in this case, we can breathe a sigh of relief over being able to afford a novel style of pizza.