The U.S. has spawned a wide variety of pizza styles, from thin-crusted foldable New York City slices to deep-dish Chicago pies to the Detroit variety with crispy cheesy edges.
Mike Dew has drawn inspiration from many of them to develop his own style at Wayfarer Tavern in the Cincinnati suburb of Dayton, Ky.
The restaurant itself is something of a hybrid. “We’re kind of like a steakhouse that serves pizza instead of steaks,” Dew said.
Rather than serving calzones and wings, the restaurant serves oysters, shrimp cocktail, carpaccio, higher-end salads, and the like, all developed by chef Mikey Fabian.
“At first, some folks were a little confused, because we’re not what they’re used to seeing from a pizza place,” Dew said. “We have nice cocktails and a really great wine list. We don’t carry every light beer and flavored vodka there is — we have Miller Lite and High Life.”
Although the food is Fabian’s, and the front of the house is run by general manager Henry Burgin, the pizza is Dew’s. A graphic designer by trade but a dedicated home cook, Dew began experimenting with pizza when he moved into a house with a pizza stone and peel.
“I was aspiring to make New Haven-style pizza [with a thin, nicely charred crust made in coal-fired ovens], but I learned quickly I didn’t have the oven for it,” he said. He went on to try grilling pizza — a technique invented in Providence, R.I., at Al Forno — as well as attempting Neapolitan-style pizza from Italy, among others. A 2011 trip to Austin, Texas, where Detroit-style pizza concept Via 313 is based, turned him on to that variety, and he discovered that was something he could make at home.
He and his wife began to throw pizza parties, and then he began doing popups out of bars, including one at New Riff Distilling at The Party Source in Bellevue, Ky.
“The bar had just opened a few months prior,” Dew said. “They were relatively slow, and I told them as we were setting up that this was going to be one of their busiest days. They were like, ‘Yeah. Whatever.’”
They sold 100 pizzas in 20 minutes.
“The line was snaking all the way through the liquor store,” Dew said.
With proof of concept established, he went to work finding a space, and Wayfarer Tavern opened in January of 2025.
The pizza isn’t Detroit-style, but more of a square-cut tavern-style with the crispy cheesy edges from Detroit.
“It’s what I describe as a hybrid of several kinds of pizza,” Dew said. “The way I look at it, there’s this bar-style-pizza belt that runs from Milwaukee through Chicago to St. Louis, and then across the Midwest through Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, and then it shoots out to New Jersey and up to Boston and their South Shore-style pizza.”
Locally, that style is reflected at LaRosa’s Pizza in Cincinnati, he said.
Dew said his crust is closest to an East Coast bar-style pie, “like that of Star Tavern [in Orange, N.J.]. But with cheesy crispy edges in the style of Detroit and sliced into Midwestern-style squares.
“It’s kind of a best of all worlds scenario,” he said.
Making the dough is a four-day process. It’s mixed and then bulk-fermented overnight. Then it’s portioned and refrigerated for at least three days, allowing the crust to develop a deeper flavor and also resulting in a crispier crust.
It’s par-baked in a pan, Detroit style.
“We cook it in the pan for five-and-a-half, six minutes. That sets the cheese and the crust,” Dew said. “Then we take it out of the pan and cook it to get the bottom finished properly — to get a dark, caramelized bottom.”
It’s cooked on pizza stones in a double-stack conveyor oven — the same style of oven as Sexton’s in Columbus, Ohio.
“I reached out to them to get a contact for this particular pizzamaker,” Dew said. “Our messed-up pizzas are few and far between — like sometimes one will fall off the edge of the conveyor belt because somebody wasn’t paying attention — but in general, compared to what might happen with a deck oven, the production is really great for ticket times, guest experience, and cook experience, because the cook doesn’t have to look in the back of the oven or worry about forgetting something.”
Dew said that developing his own style of pizza not only means he can make it just as he likes it, but he doesn’t risk being accused of being inauthentic.
“I think when you try to carbon copy a style, and you're not of that region, or you didn't come up in that, it's always going to be a watered-down version of it,” he said.
Instead, customers appreciate Wayfarer Tavern’s pizza for what it is.
“People comment all the time about how it's the best pizza they've ever had,” he said. “If they're from Milwaukee or Chicago, they say it reminds them of home, even though we’re not emulating Chicago pizza. I think it's enough of a callback for those folks that they really enjoy it.”
And New Yorkers also enjoy it.
“They’ll crush the whole pizza in 15 minutes and get a second one,” he said. “From the pizza standpoint, it's been awesome, and from a restaurant standpoint, people are getting what we're doing — we routinely get awesome reviews about our service and that our space is cool.”
And because Dew’s pizza style is his own, he can do what he wants with it.
“We don't have any constraints or rules. There’s pineapple on some pizza, but we also have Korean corn cheese pizza,” he said. “We did a tiki-night event at our space and had a Spam musubi pizza with Spam, pickled ginger, and furikake. We just have fun with it.”
A year and a half in, Dew has promised profit sharing for Burgin and Fabian once they close the books on their first full year of business, and he’s exploring the possibility of expansion.
“The way this first location has come together has been all about really great timing, including help from the Dayton city manager and the building owner,” he said. “I have a very opinionated idea of what kind of neighborhood and building I want to go in, and I’m going to trust the universe to work in that same way it did for the first one.”
Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@informa.com