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Blue Pan Pizza
Blue Pan Pizza opened in 2015 in Denver's West Highland neighborhood, founded by Michigan natives Giles Flanagin and chef Jeff "Smoke" Smokevitch as an intimate, 18-seat pizzeria built around a style Denver hadn't seen much of before: Detroit-style deep dish, with its thick, square crust and famously crispy, caramelized cheese-to-edge crust. The founders brought that pan-pizza tradition directly from their home state rather than adapting a more familiar Chicago or New York format. That Detroit square format is the whole draw — a rectangular pie baked in a well-oiled steel pan, producing a crust that's simultaneously airy in the middle and deeply crisp along the edges where the cheese caramelizes against the hot metal, a genuinely different eating experience from the round, thin-crust pizzas that dominate most of Denver's other pizzerias. Since opening, the restaurant has kept that Detroit-style focus as its core identity even as the menu has grown around it. National attention followed the local reputation Blue Pan built in its original 18-seat space — the restaurant has been featured on Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, recognition that's helped support real expansion beyond the original West Highland storefront into a Congress Park location and, eventually, Golden. For a Denver pizza list, Blue Pan Pizza is the essential "Detroit-style done right" entry — a thick, square-cut, crispy-edged deep dish from two Michigan transplants who brought a genuinely different pan-pizza tradition to West Highland in 2015 and have since grown it into a small, Food Network-recognized local chain.
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Beau Jo's
Beau Jo's has been making what it calls "Colorado-style" mountain pies since 1973, when the original location opened in the mountain town of Idaho Springs. Half a century later, the chain has grown to seven locations across Colorado — including Arvada, Fort Collins, Lone Tree, Steamboat Springs, and Denver — while keeping the same thick-crust format that made the original location a mountain-town institution in the first place. The defining feature is the crust itself: a hand-rolled, thick ring of daily-made dough that builds a genuine wall around the edge of the pie, letting Beau Jo's load on toppings — the pizzas are sized and sold by the pound rather than by diameter — well past what a standard crust could contain. That crust does double duty as dessert, too; the restaurant's honey-dipping tradition, pouring local honey over the leftover crust once the toppings are gone, has become as closely associated with Beau Jo's as the pizza itself. That combination — thick, topping-loaded "mountain pies" named for the Rockies, sold in pound increments, finished with honey — is different enough from a standard American pizzeria that it's become a specifically Colorado dining tradition rather than a regional variation on a national style. More than fifty years after the Idaho Springs original opened, the chain has expanded into shipping pies nationally through Goldbelly, extending a mountain-town pizzeria's reach well past what its founders likely imagined in 1973. For a Denver pizza list, Beau Jo's is the essential "this is Colorado's own pizza style" entry — a thick-crusted, honey-finished mountain pie sold by the pound, a genuinely regional format that's been running continuously since 1973 and has since spread from its original mountain-town location into Denver and beyond.
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