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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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Cart-Driver
Cart-Driver started small — genuinely small — in a roughly 650-square-foot shipping container in Denver's RiNo neighborhood, founded by Andrew Birkholz in 2014 around wood-fired Neapolitan pizza made with a 200-year-old dough starter sourced from a volcanic island in the Gulf of Naples. That starter is the kind of detail that separates a restaurant chasing an authentic Neapolitan tradition from one simply borrowing the aesthetic, and it's stayed central to Cart-Driver's identity as the restaurant has grown well beyond its original shipping-container footprint. The restaurant expanded into a full Highland/LoHi space in 2019, pairing its wood-fired pies — including a signature margherita the menu calls "the Daisy" — with a broader raw bar and seasonal market-plate menu built around oysters, prosecco on tap, and craft cocktails. That's a meaningfully more polished, drink-forward setting than a typical thin-crust pizzeria, positioning Cart-Driver closer to a full night-out destination than a quick slice stop. Cart-Driver has been credited with helping bring a genuine wave of serious Neapolitan pizza to Denver, and the restaurant has backed that reputation with repeated Westword Best of Denver awards for best pizza — recognition that's held even through a temporary closure of the Highland location for plumbing repairs, after which the restaurant reopened rather than folding the concept. For a Denver pizza list, Cart-Driver is the essential "thin-crust pizza as a full night out" entry — a 200-year-old starter's worth of Neapolitan pizza tradition, paired with oysters and prosecco in a Highland dining room that grew out of a single RiNo shipping container.
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