SoDough Square Brings Detroit to Michigan Street
Blue steel pans, 24-hour dough and a caramelized cheese crust: SoDough Square's SoDo original is Orlando's Detroit-style specialist, ranked No. 5 for pizza citywide.
3 minute read
Of all the addresses in Orlando, a Detroit-style pizzeria could hardly do better than East Michigan Street in SoDo — and SoDough Square, at 419 E. Michigan St., Suite 5, makes the joke structural. The name works three ways at once: the district, the street, and the shape of the pie. Founder Robert Bair grew up in the Detroit area eating square pizza, and what he built in SoDo is less an homage than a transplant — the real process, moved south intact.
SoDough Square ranks No. 5 in our Best Pizza in Orlando rankings with a Net Score of 92.1, in a city where pizza loyalty usually splits between New York slices and Neapolitan rounds. It earned that spot by being the specialist: when Orlando wants Detroit style specifically, this is the name that comes up first, and the shop has since carried the concept to additional locations beyond its SoDo original.
What Detroit style actually means here
Detroit-style pizza is a rectangular pan pizza with a thick, chewy-crisp crust, and SoDough’s own description of its process is admirably specific. The pies bake in traditional blue steel pans sourced directly from Michigan — the style’s origin story runs through pans of the kind once used on automobile assembly lines. The dough is high-hydration and fermented for more than 24 hours in house. The sauce is a house Detroit red made from fresh-pack tomatoes. The cheese is a proprietary brick-cheese blend, shredded in house, and it is applied all the way to the edges so the pan produces the style’s signature: the frico, a lacy, caramelized cheese crust that runs down the sides of every square.
The result, at its best, threads a needle most thick pizzas miss. The exterior is crisp and almost fried at the cheese line; the interior stays light and airy rather than bready and dense. Reviewers who arrive skeptical of thick pizza tend to use the same words — crisp outside, soft inside, sauce with actual tang — which is the style working as designed.
What to order
The menu’s headline pie is the Detroit Rob City, topped with whipped ricotta, sausage and pepperoni and finished with hot honey — a sweet-heat combination that has become the shop’s calling card across its locations. The 6 & Conant is the meatless anchor: house red sauce, cheese and fresh basil, named with the same Detroit street-corner logic as the shop itself. The Enforcer, numbered 24, carries the hockey-town thread further. Detroit-style cheesy garlic bread, made with the same dough logic, is the starter regulars insist on, and the menu nods to its roots with a Detroit-style coney dog for anyone who wants the full Michigan brief in one sitting.
Format matters to the experience. The pies are sold as small four-slice squares — a size that suits one hungry person or a shared order alongside something from next door — and the room is shared with Bair’s neighboring concept, Tin & Taco, at the same 419 E. Michigan St. address. That shared dining room is a genuine SoDo asset: a table can run a Detroit Rob City and a trio of cheese-crusted craft tacos (Tin & Taco Sodo ranks No. 3 in our Best Mexican Restaurants in Orlando rankings, Net Score 87.9; see our winner feature) without anyone compromising. Few plazas in Orlando let two ranked kitchens split a check that gracefully. The full corridor picture is in Where to Eat in SoDo.
How it fits the neighborhood
Critic Scott Joseph, reviewing the shop in its early soft-opening period, noted both the cleverness of the name and the fairness of the proposition — a good product at a fair price, from the same operator behind the popular taco shop next door. That assessment has aged well. SoDough is not trying to be Orlando’s special-occasion pizza; it is trying to be the pizza a neighborhood orders on a Thursday, and the Michigan Street original remains the spiritual home even as the brand grows — it is the location our rankings score, and the one pinned on the Orlando Top Spots Map.
One practical note: the SoDo shop’s weekly rhythm has historically included a Monday closure, with lunch and dinner service the rest of the week — check the shop’s site for the current schedule before a Monday craving takes hold. Go for the Rob City, add the cheesy bread without being asked twice, and eat at least one corner piece while it is still crackling. The corner is the whole argument.
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