Detroit Food Guide: Coney Dogs, Detroit Pizza and Local Legends
- The Anonymous Hungry Hippopotamus
- Aug 19, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
Two foods define Detroit more than any others: the hot dog and the pizza. I'd heard about Detroit-style pizza long before I arrived. The hot dog was new to me entirely, and it turned out to have its own strange, specific history.
Coney Dogs
Michigan calls its hot dog a Coney dog, which is confusing given that it didn't originate on Coney Island, the actual birthplace of the American hot dog. The story goes that Greek immigrant brothers, arriving through Ellis Island, passed through New York on their way to Detroit and encountered the New York hot dog along the way. When they opened their own version back in Michigan, they named it after the place where they'd first seen it.
A Coney dog is a beef frankfurter topped with bean-less chili, called Coney sauce, along with diced onions and yellow mustard. Ask who makes the best one in Detroit and you'll get pulled into a rivalry more than a century old, between two restaurants standing directly next door to each other.
American Coney Island
American Coney Island opened first.
It was launched on West Lafayette Street in downtown Detroit in 1917 by Gust Keros and his brother William, both Greek immigrants.
The restaurant still stands in that same location today.
American Coney Island continues to be family owned and today, is operated by the third generation of the Keros family.
The American Coney Island version leans on a snappy casing, slightly sweet chili, sweet onions, and tangy mustard.
Lafayette Coney Island
Lafayette Coney Island opened in 1924, several years later, and exists entirely because of a falling out. William Keros left the American Coney Island partnership and opened his own place, steps away from his brother's restaurant. Lafayette isn't family-held anymore, but it's just as popular, louder and livelier than its refined neighbor, a diner through and through.
The Lafayette Coney dog is very, very similar to that of its neighboring restaurant. It also uses an all beef hot dog, placed in a steamed bun.
The chili at Lafayette is a bit spicier however, the onions more course and the hot dog itself is more seasoned.
Both restaurants serve a version with cheese that's genuinely excellent, and the rivalry between them has run long enough and loud enough to catch the attention of Man v. Food, The Travel Channel, and Food Wars. Visit both. Decide for yourself. You'll be participating in an argument that's been running for over a hundred years with no sign of settling.
(If you love hot dogs, my Chicago hot dog adventure is worth a read too.)
Buddy's Pizza
If Detroit made its mark on the hot dog, its real legacy is pizza. Every city seems to have its own version by now: thick crust, thin crust, stuffed crust, Neapolitan, Roman, Chicago-style, New York-style. Detroit's entry into that list has its own strange origin story, tied directly to the same automotive plants that built the city's economy.
Buddy's Pizza is where it started. Gus Guerra opened Buddy's Rendezvous, a former speakeasy, as a pizzeria in 1946, using his wife Anna's family recipe for sfincione, a thick Sicilian pizza, as the starting point.
What he didn't have was the right pan, so he borrowed one: a square, forged-steel tray originally used at local auto plants to hold small parts and hardware. Seems very appropriate since the pizza was birthed in Motor City. The pan worked far better than anyone expected, producing a crust that was airy inside and crisp along every edge, seasoned a little more with every use.
That single choice defined the whole style. Detroit-style pizza bakes in a square or rectangular steel pan, its dough double-proofed and pressed all the way to the corners. Wisconsin brick cheese runs edge to edge, caramelizing against the hot metal where it meets the pan. The sauce goes on last, ladled in deliberate stripes across the top rather than underneath, an inversion of how nearly every other pizza in the country is built, styled to resemble racing stripes, a small, intentional homage to the automotive city that shaped it.
Detroit Public TV and Detroiter Pizza
I ordered the two pizzas everyone told me to order, both built around pepperoni, and I wasn't about to argue. The Detroit Public TV uses Buddy's Motor City cheese blend, red sauce, and crisped Old World pepperoni. The Detroiter layers pepperoni under a tomato basil sauce seasoned with Buddy's Sicilian spice blend, finished with a mix of Wisconsin brick and Parmesan.
Both pizzas were excellent, and so was everything else I ate in Detroit that week. A city that reinvented the hot dog and the pizza, using nothing more exotic than immigrant recipes and a spare parts tray from a factory floor, has earned the right to be taken seriously as a food city, not just a car town that happens to also feed people well.
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