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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
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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