Emmy Squared - Midtown West

Detroit-Style Pizza in the Columbus Circle Corridor

West 60th Street sits at the edge of a zone that most dining conversations skip entirely. 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 geographic logic here 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. You don't need to plan Emmy Squared as your evening's centerpiece, it works equally well as the meal before a concert 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.

The Emmy Squared chain built its reputation in New York's Brooklyn and East Village locations before expanding to Midtown, and its approach to the Detroit format has been consistent across sites: 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 Midtown West Location in Context

For visitors using New York as a multi-restaurant trip, the Midtown West address is a practical consideration worth taking seriously. 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 find themselves needing a reliable, lower-stakes meal in between. Emmy Squared fills that slot without requiring advance planning at the level those higher-tier rooms demand.

For context on how New York's broader dining ecosystem distributes across formats and neighborhoods, our full New York City restaurants guide maps the city's key addresses by category and area.

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, though each operates in a different format tier. 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.

High-end tasting format travelers can also look at The French Laundry in Napa, Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown, Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg, Addison in San Diego, and The Inn at Little Washington in Washington for contrast at the other end of the American format register. International travelers curious about the formal European tradition can reference Atelier Moessmer Norbert Niederkofler in Brunico or Dal Pescatore in Runate for a sense of how different the formal European tradition reads against the American casual end.

Planning Your Visit

Address: 200 W 60th St, New York, NY 10023, positioned one block from Columbus Circle, within walking distance of Lincoln Center. Reservations: Contact the restaurant directly or check the Emmy Squared website for current booking availability; walk-in availability varies by time and day. Budget: Priced well below the formal fine-dining tier that surrounds it at Columbus Circle; expect a casual meal format rather than a tasting menu investment. Timing: Pre-concert windows at Lincoln Center tend to drive early evening demand; arriving outside those windows typically offers easier access.