Making Detroit-style pizza turned out to be Evan Weinstein’s saving grace during the pandemic.
When the music stopped playing and all of the lights went out at concerts nationwide due to the pandemic, Evan Weinstein, a promoter and founder of Steez Promo, found himself at a professional crossroads.
“COVID hit and everything shut down within five days,” he says. “I followed [news of] COVID for a while so I had an idea of what was coming, but a part of me thought we would lose the summer concert season.”
It was when concert venues officially closed for the unforeseeable future in 2020 that Weinstein opened another door for himself. He started Underground Pizza, turning on the lights to a new restaurant venture.
“I made my first pizza at the end of May [of 2020] for myself,” says Weinstein, 39, a Towson resident and Philadelphia native. “I posted a picture on Facebook, and people started offering to buy them from me. I realized I could make a little extra money, so I started making extra pizzas.
“It started with 10 extras, then 20 and then 100 pizzas a week out of my house,” he says. “I would meet people in parking lots, and they would give me money in exchange for pizza.”
After spending months making Detroit-style pizzas out of his home, Weinstein decided to take the plunge and open his first restaurant operation. Last December, when Baltimore’s food scene was largely closing once again because of a COVID-19 surge, Weinstein opened the doors to his pizza bistro in Power Plant Live!
“We wanted to open. We were ready and didn’t see the point in waiting,” he says. “We opened for carryout only. I joke if I knew selling pizzas was easier then selling concert tickets, I would have started making pizza earlier.”
Underground Pizza is now open for dine-in and carryout service, with indoor and outdoor seating. Weinstein has employed more than a dozen people during a time when many people lost their jobs.
“I created jobs during the pandemic,” says Weinstein, founder of the annual Moonrise Festival at Pimlico Race Course. “At one point, I had four or five people from the concert industry [working] at the restaurant. Now, we are still looking to hire even more people.”
While Detroit-style pizza is fairly new to the Baltimore area, Weinstein’s love for the saucy dish runs deep. In fact, he says the reason he started making the pizza at home was because he tired of traveling to get a good pan of pizza.
“I was driving over two hours round-trip to Washington, D.C., to pick up pizza,” Weinstein says. “Detroit-style is my favorite pizza and no one else had it, so I would drive there during the beginning of the pandemic because it cheered me up.”
So what exactly makes Detroit-style pizza so special?
“Detroit pizza is made in a deep dish,” he says. “There is higher hydration and longer cooking time, it has crispy cheese edges and the sauce goes on last. The pan is made of blue steel, and legend has it is someone used old drip pans from the automotive industry and started cooking pizzas in them. That’s where Detroit-style came from.”
Even though the music industry is waking up, Weinstein says he’s not turning his back on his new pizza business. In fact, he hopes to open two more Underground Pizza restaurants in the area, including one in Towson, and then take the business to the national level.
“It’s tough out here for restaurant owners, and tough for all of us,” Weinstein says. “Very few people haven’t been deeply affected in some way or another [by the pandemic]. In the beginning, it was survival but now it’s turned into seeing how far we can take this. We think we have some of the best pizza in the country and want to get it into as many hands as possible.”
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