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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.
VS
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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