Where It All Began
Steel Pan Pizza Co. was born in 2004 in a converted 800-square-foot auto shop on Gratiot Avenue on Detroit's east side. Founder Marcus Webb had no formal culinary training — just a cast-iron work ethic, a grandmother's recipe for focaccia dough, and a set of blue steel industrial pans he bought at an Eastern Market estate sale for twelve dollars.
Marcus had watched the Detroit-style deep dish tradition — invented in the 1940s in the city's factory district — slowly fade through the 1990s as chains moved in and neighborhood joints shuttered. He believed the style deserved a new chapter. So he cleaned those steel pans, proofed his first batch of dough, and opened the doors with a handwritten menu on a chalkboard and no online presence whatsoever.
"Detroit raised me. I figured the least I could do was feed her back."
— Marcus Webb, Founder
Word spread the old-fashioned way — mouth to mouth across barbershops, union halls, and school parking lots. Within six months, the lunch rush required a second oven. Within a year, Marcus had knocked out a wall and doubled the dining room. The wait times got longer. Nobody left.
What Makes Detroit Style Different
True Detroit-style deep dish is defined by three non-negotiables: the pan, the cheese, and the sequence. The rectangular blue steel pans — originally sourced from Michigan auto parts suppliers — create an airy, focaccia-like interior crust with shatteringly crispy, caramelized bottom and sides. Wisconsin brick cheese is layered all the way to the pan edges, so it fries directly against the hot steel and creates those legendary lacey cheese corners. And the sauce always goes on last, ladled in stripes across the top rather than spread beneath the toppings.
Every step resists shortcuts. Our dough cold-proofs for 48 hours. Our tomato sauce is slow-roasted from whole San Marzano tomatoes every morning. Our pans are hand-seasoned and never washed with soap. These aren't rules for us — they're instincts developed over twenty years of feeding Detroit.
The People Behind the Pans
Today, Steel Pan Pizza Co. operates three locations across metropolitan Detroit and employs over 80 people, most of them Detroit residents. Marcus still walks every kitchen daily, still tastes every sauce batch, and still refuses to let a pie leave the oven with an uneven crust. His daughter Imani joined the operation in 2018 and leads the catering and events division that has fed tens of thousands at corporate events, weddings, and community fundraisers across southeast Michigan.
We source our mozzarella from a family dairy in northern Michigan. Our Italian sausage is made by a fifth-generation butcher two miles from our Gratiot Ave. flagship. Our basil comes from a urban farm co-op in Eastern Market that we've supported since 2009. Every choice is a vote for the city we love.
