Pizza Pushers hopes to carve Detroit-style area of interest in Algonquin

The owners of a new Detroit-style pizza restaurant in Algonquin, Pizza Pushers, hope to carve out a niche among tavern-style and deep-dish options with their square-pan Motor City slices.

“It’s not easy to bring a regional product to a part of the country that has two distinctive styles of pizza already,” co-owner Harry Canelos said.

The restaurant had a soft opening last month. Eschewing social media or other marketing, Canelos and his business partners, Jamie Trakas and Chilo Lagunes, have instead worked on honing their craft, hiring and training staff, and slowly building up word-of-mouth from those who happen upon the restaurant, located just south of the intersection of Route 31 and Main Street.

“If it were up to me, we wouldn’t even put up a sign,” Canelos said jokingly.

Detroit-style pizza is characterized by its square or rectangular shape, brick cheese and “upside-down” toppings, with the sauce on top.

The key to a great pizza, Detroit-style or otherwise, is the dough, Canelos said, and for Detroit-style, it should be light and fluffy.

“You can buy great cheese, tomatoes, sauce, pepperoni, but if you don’t make quality dough, your pizza can never rise above ‘pretty good,'” Canelos said.

Pizza Pushers uses a raw focaccia base for the dough, which is leavened at room temperature in the morning, Canelos said. He comes in early in the morning to make two batches, one the same as the day before and one with minor tweaks to variables like yeast or water temperature, to see what works best.

“It’s science,” Canelos said.

All three co-owners have decades of experience in the restaurant business, Canelos said, but this is their first time running a pizza-only venture.

Canelos, originally from Chandler, Arizona, previously operated a mobile pizza truck, Quadro, which served New York-Detroit hybrid pizzas, although he said he never used the “Detroit” label for fear of getting called out by Motor City transplants.

The truck was named one of the top 100 restaurants in the region by the Phoenix New Times.

Pizza Pushers offers a half-dozen pizza varieties on the menu. In addition to traditional choices such as pepperoni, cheese and veggie, it serves up the spicier “Hell Raiser,” with pickled jalapeños and hot honey, and the “Winston Wolf,” which has vodka cream sauce as its base.

“I think Detroit-style has staying power,” Canelos said. “It’s a good product. It looks like it’ll be heavy, but it eats light. People like it.”

Pizza Pushers is at 644 S. Main St. in Algonquin. For more information, call (779) 247-9958.