Detroit-style pizza has at least three unique characteristics: The first is that it is square, achieved by baking it in a deep pan. The second is its texture — the crunch must be unmatched. The third is that the cheese and the tomato sauce are flipped around. The cheese is spread across the full pan, which creates a caramelized border across the pizza’s edges. The sauce is added on top of the cheese to protect the crust and spotlight the tomato flavor.

When the Fittipaldi brothers were opening their own pizza place, they landed on the Detroit-style format pretty easily. But at Fitti’s Pizza, which celebrated its grand opening in October 2025, the menu is one of a kind. Fitti’s is currently located in a small west Eugene industrial plaza. Due to the space’s size, every week it undergoes a transformation. Throughout the week, the space is a kitchen, which is shared with local bakery Red Hen Kitchen. On Tuesdays, when it is the Fittipaldis’ turn to use the space, they enter the kitchen and do all of the prep work they can; this means baking the dough, barbecuing 40 pounds of chicken, hand making their ranch, tomato sauce, honey jalapeños, garlic bites and cinnamon pull-aparts using leftover dough. 

On the weekends, the prep tables get moved away, the doors open and it becomes their storefront. 

“It’s a Detroit-inspired pizza,” owner Sam Fittipaldi clarifies. A typical Detroit-style pizza is particularly dense and covered in Wisconsin cheese. But the Fittipaldi’s dough undergoes a three-day cold fermentation process and grain hydration to make the bread “light and airy so it creates this nice, crispy, fluffy center, but it’s firm enough to hold different toppings,” Fittipaldi’s partner Lynn Yeager says.  

In fact, the entire concept of starting a restaurant was based around Fittipaldi and his two brothers, Joe and Jesse, and their passion for breadmaking. The Fittipaldis all grew up in an Italian household where their grandmother taught them the simple joys of cooking. But making bread, Fittipaldi says, was the thing that stuck. “It is so much about the process, more than it is the product. It’s just nerding out on the process. One little thing goes wrong, and you’re done. It’s very rewarding when you get it right.” 

As a group, “we were just making a lot of pizza out of a passion for it. And then all of a sudden, we were having 20 friends over,” Fittipaldi says. The brothers talked about starting a business for years, but when the opportunity arose, they took the jump. Now, the kitchen is staffed by Fittipaldi and his daughter, Alexis, while  Jesse and Yeager host and Joe promotes the brand from his home in Hawaii. 

Fittipaldi says he and his brothers have always been “a couple nerds making dough.” 

The Detroit style was chosen because with a standard New York-style round pizza, Fittipaldi notes that toppings can only be used sparingly, “which is great. That’s that style.” But he points out that if you top it with too many ingredients, “You’re gonna pick it up, and it’s just gonna fall over.”

The Detroit style, he says, lends itself to the creativity that round pizza does not — which is exemplified in their deceivingly small menu (currently sitting at six pizzas with one seasonal special). February’s special is banh mi pizza. Banh mi is a type of Vietnamese sandwich, but Fitti’s has slightly restyled it. It is topped with ingredients such as soy lemongrass, marinated charcoal grilled chicken, pickled carrots and daikon, honey jalapeño, cilantro, cucumber, thai basil, mint and a side of homemade buttermilk ranch. 

Yeager refers to their various reworkings of the Detroit style as a “Pacific Northwest twist,” describing their pizza as having a “bold flavor profile, and mixing really unique ingredients and creating a great story for the menu.” 

Another important factor: “Whatever we can source, we try to find the best possible ingredients for every single thing that we use, from the tomatoes that we select, from our sauces and where we get our herbs, even how he sources this flour,” Yeager says. “Everything is very thoughtfully designed so that we can offer the best quality product that we can.”

Since their business is young, they hope to utilize their small space to refine their flavors and recipes before eventually expanding. But Fittipaldi says that this is purely a passion project. 

“There’s things that you go make money at,” Fittipaldi says. “Obviously, it’s necessary. But when you’re doing what you’re passionate about, it’s just fulfilling.” He continues, “nobody would stand out here in 13-degree weather and barbecue chicken — oh, my god, for pizza, right? But it’s worth it.”

 Fitti’s Pizza is at 1035 Conger Street, unit 7. Open 4 pm to 8 pm Fridays, 3 pm to 8 pm Saturdays and 4 pm to 8 pm Sundays. Visit FittisPizza.com or call 541-321-8472.