Emmy Squared - Midtown West

Detroit-Style Pizza in the Columbus Circle Corridor

West 60th Street sits at the edge of a zone that many dining conversations overlook. Columbus Circle draws the marquee names, the kind of addresses where a tasting menu runs north of $300 and a reservation requires three months of calendar management. The stretch immediately around it, though, is where the city's more casual but carefully considered dining formats have found room to operate. Emmy Squared's Midtown West location sits in that corridor, serving Detroit-style pizza to a neighborhood that more typically directs visitors toward Per Se or Masa for the full-occasion formats.

The geography matters. Lincoln Center sits a short walk north. The Time Warner Center towers at the circle itself. This is a neighborhood with a consistent evening foot-traffic pattern tied to performance schedules, which gives a pizza-focused format a structural advantage that a destination-only restaurant wouldn't enjoy. It works equally well as a meal before a concert or as the destination itself.

What Detroit Style Actually Means

Detroit-style pizza occupies a specific and increasingly competitive lane in New York's pizza conversation. The format is defined by its rectangular pan, a thick and airy interior crumb, a crisp lacy-cheese crust formed by the cheese spreading to the pan's edges and caramelizing against the steel, and sauce applied over the cheese rather than beneath it. This is a meaningfully different product from the Neapolitan tradition that anchors most of the city's pizza identity, and also distinct from the grandma-style squares that New York pizza shops have produced for decades.

Emmy Squared's approach to the Detroit format has been consistent across its New York locations: a commitment to the pan-baked square as the primary format, with a burger program running alongside it. In a city where pizza regionalism is treated with something close to doctrinal seriousness, the Detroit style still reads as a relative newcomer to most diners, which means Emmy Squared functions, in part, as an introduction to a format that has significant partisan support among those who know it.

That positioning places Emmy Squared in a different competitive conversation than the city's fine-dining addresses. It doesn't price against Le Bernardin or Eleven Madison Park, and it isn't trying to. The more relevant comparable set is the broader category of serious casual formats, places where the product has a defined point of view and the kitchen operates with precision, but the price point and format remain accessible.

The Midtown West Location in Context

For visitors planning multiple meals in New York, the Midtown West address is a practical consideration. Many of the city's highest-profile dining rooms cluster in specific corridors, Tribeca, the West Village, the stretch of Midtown that runs from the 40s to the 50s along Sixth and Seventh. The Columbus Circle adjacent area has historically been underloved from a dining perspective relative to its foot traffic, which makes a well-executed casual format here more useful than it would be in a neighborhood already dense with options.

Travelers anchoring their New York dining itinerary around the city's formal fine-dining tier, Atomix in NoMad, or the Columbus Circle neighbors already mentioned, often need a reliable, lower-stakes meal in between. Emmy Squared fills that slot without requiring advance planning at the level those higher-tier rooms demand.

Detroit Style Against the American Pizza Map

American regional pizza styles have experienced something of a critical rehabilitation over the past decade, with formats once considered provincial now earning serious attention from food writers and chefs. The Detroit style is part of that shift. Its closest structural relatives in the broader American pizza taxonomy are the Sicilian-influenced square and certain Midwestern pan formats, but the lacy-edge caramelized cheese treatment gives it a distinct textural identity that neither of those traditions replicates exactly.

This context matters when comparing Emmy Squared to what the rest of the country is doing with serious casual pizza. Operations like Lazy Bear in San Francisco or the long-standing reputation of Emeril's in New Orleans occupy entirely different format categories, but they share a concern with regional American identity that Emmy Squared applies to a pizza tradition rather than a broader regional cuisine. The question of what makes a pizza format worth traveling for, the same question that sends people to specific destinations for specific dishes, is one that Detroit-style advocates answer with the caramelized edge and the steel-pan crumb.

For those whose American dining itinerary extends beyond New York, the same careful-casual logic applies at addresses like Frasca Food & Wine in Boulder, Smyth in Chicago, or Providence in Los Angeles. The broader point is that American dining no longer requires a trip to the formal end of the spectrum to find a kitchen with a clear point of view.

Planning Your Visit