Otto Dilba believes everyone has a singular thing that drives them, and his own is straightforward: making people happy. Over the last few decades, that’s taken the form of operating a craft brewery and, more recently, creating Detroit-style pizzas.
Dilba — who co-founded Ale Asylum, the local brewery that closed its doors in 2022 after a 16-year run — turned to Detroit-style pizza as a means of coping during a difficult time. Like a mad scientist, he shuttered himself away for approximately 18 months, using his home kitchen as a lab to birth the perfect Detroit-style pizza dough. The result of his exhaustive research is on display at Molten Monkey, a modest yet hip pizza parlor that opened on East Johnson Street late last year.
“I told myself after Ale Asylum closed that if I ever did anything in the hospitality industry again, I would want it to be small, cozy and manageable,” says Dilba. “Being able to talk to people, see it on their faces, the eye rolls that you see as people taste something for the first time, that is my favorite feeling in the world.”
Detroit-style pizza, with its light and airy crumb, savory sweet sauce and cheese caramelized over the edges of a squared-off crust, has been enjoying something of a renaissance in recent years. Dilba has visited some of the best parlors serving Detroit-style pizza in the country — think Texas, California and, of course, Detroit — in an effort to distill the best parts of the style into some seriously delicious and memorable pies…