Emmy Squared Pizza: Germantown

Detroit Format, Southern Address

Germantown is the neighbourhood Nashville's food community watches most closely right now. Within a few blocks of 5th Avenue North, you can trace the arc of the city's dining ambitions: from the refined contemporary American of Bastion ($$$$) to the progressive precision of Locust. Into this context, Emmy Squared Pizza arrives with a format that is neither Southern nor Nashvillian by origin: the Detroit-style pan pizza, a thick-rimmed, cheese-edged square with a focaccia-adjacent crumb and a lacquered undercarriage that comes from baking in seasoned steel pans. The fact that this format has found a home in Germantown rather than, say, a strip-mall corridor in Antioch says something about how the neighbourhood has positioned itself as a place where imported technique gets a hearing.

Detroit-style pizza occupies a specific tier in the American pizza conversation. It is not Neapolitan, not New York slice, not Roman al taglio. Its identity comes from the pan: a rectangular steel mould originally borrowed from automotive parts trays in mid-century Michigan, which conducts heat in a way that fries the cheese along the edges into a caramelised crust that no wood-fired oven can replicate. The result is a pizza with structural integrity, crunch on the bottom and sides, and an interior that stays open and airy rather than doughy. Emmy Squared, which has locations in several American cities, has helped spread this format beyond its Detroit roots and into markets where the dominant pizza conversation had previously been shaped by thin-crust traditions.

The Technique Behind the Square

Emmy Squared Germantown is not merely square pizza. It is that a highly specific industrial technique from the American Midwest has been transplanted into a Southern city and allowed to coexist with a dining culture that prizes both tradition and novelty. This is a dynamic that plays out at restaurants across the country: at Smyth in Chicago, Midwestern produce gets filtered through fine-dining technique; at Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg, Japanese kaiseki discipline reshapes Californian farm produce. Emmy Squared operates at a different price point and register, but the underlying logic is similar: take a method from somewhere specific and apply it somewhere new, letting the friction generate something worth eating.

The Detroit pan method rewards patience in a way that many casual pizza formats do not. The dough needs time to proof in the pan before baking, and the cheese, typically Wisconsin brick or a blend that approximates it, must be layered to the very edges so that it contacts the pan directly and crisps as it bakes. Sauce is often applied on top of the cheese rather than beneath it, a counter-intuitive move that keeps the base dry and crackly even after the pizza sits for a few minutes. Getting this right in a high-volume, multi-city restaurant operation requires consistent process discipline that goes beyond most casual pizza kitchens.

Germantown as Context

Placing Emmy Squared on 5th Avenue North puts it in a part of Nashville that has accumulated serious dining credibility over the past decade. The area's identity as a food destination owes something to early movers who treated the neighbourhood as a blank canvas for ambitious projects, and subsequent arrivals have had to meet a bar that is higher than in more tourist-facing parts of the city. The Catbird Seat set an early benchmark for technique-forward tasting menus, while Peninsula extended the neighbourhood's range into Southern-inflected American cooking. Within this peer group, Emmy Squared occupies a different tier: it is casual and accessible where many of its neighbours are reservation-intensive and formal. That accessibility is not a diminishment. In a neighbourhood that can feel self-consciously serious, a well-executed square pizza with a cold beer is a different kind of contribution.

For visitors building a broader Nashville itinerary, Germantown rewards a half-day rather than a single meal. The proximity of multiple dining-level options means that Emmy Squared can function as lunch before an evening reservation elsewhere, or as a standalone dinner when the desire for precision tasting menus has temporarily faded.

Where Emmy Squared Sits in the National Pizza Conversation

American pizza has fragmented into a series of distinct technical traditions, each with its own regional allegiances and its own set of practitioners who take the method seriously. The Neapolitan conversation is anchored by wood-fired heat and short fermentation; New York slice culture prizes foldability and high-gluten flour; Roman-style al taglio has grown a dedicated following in cities with strong Italian-American communities. Detroit-style sits apart from all of these. Its advocates point to the pan as the essential variable: the shape, the material, and the temperature at which it bakes produce a result that no other method can approximate.

Emmy Squared has done more than most operators to bring this argument to new audiences. The brand's presence in Nashville specifically places it alongside a set of Nashville-based casual venues that have used out-of-region technique to build local followings. 12 South Taproom and Grill represents a different end of the casual dining range in Nashville, and the contrast between the two illustrates how varied the city's approachable dining tier has become. Nationally, the appetite for technique-specific casual dining continues to grow: the same impulse that fills counters at Lazy Bear in San Francisco or shapes the sourcing agenda at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown filters down, in a different register, into the decision to do one specific pizza format and do it with fidelity.

It is worth noting the broader geography of serious American dining that Emmy Squared's Nashville presence connects to. When a format-focused operation opens in a city that has also attracted attention from critics following venues like Emeril's in New Orleans, Providence in Los Angeles, or Addison in San Diego, it signals that the city's dining culture has room for both the high-end tasting menu tier and the technically rigorous casual tier. Nashville is in that position now.

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