Mootz Pizzeria + Bar
1230 Library StreetI was only supposed to spend one night in Detroit for work….but that turned in to two nights.
I knew there was a possibility but I still didn’t really prepare for it. I only packed enough clothes for one night so I had to make a Meijer run. We also only had our hotel rooms for one night so we had to swtich from Greektown to the Hilton Garden Inn.
We worked a pretty long day on Wednesday but still got back to the hotel around 7:30. I still had some work to do once I got there but dinner quickly became a priority. I did a search for pizza around me and found a pizzeria within walking distance with online ordering.
Mootz Pizzeria + Bar is on Library Street in downtown Detroit north of Gratiot. There are two ways to enter the restaurant. There’s a great alley known as The Belt that runs behind the restaurant.
I could smell the pizza from this alley and since I wasn’t familiar with the area, turned down the alley when I saw the sign. Turns out, the door is actually locked due to COVID but an employee was coming out to smoke and he told me I could come in that way but to head to the front.
The front door entrance looks like a typical city storefront. There is a little bit of parallel parking on the street and a couple rows of tables in an outdoor dining area right in front of the large windows looking in to the bar.
It was Wednesday night at about 8:30 when I stopped in to get my pizza. The place was pretty empty and both front of the house employees were sitting at the large that kind of dominates the space.
There’s also a pretty good size dining room wrapped around the bar and looking in to the kitchen. The decor is very sleek and very modern. It’s a bar that fits perfectly into the modern city surrounding it.
It looked like there was a carry-out entrance I should have went in to but I didn’t know that. I asked if I needed to go out and come back in but one of the employees said she’d grab it for me. She went through the swinging door that separates the kitchen from the dining room and came back with my box.
I ordered and paid online so all I had to do was check the receipt to make sure the tip went on it then walk back to the hotel to eat my first meal of the day.
I ordered the pizza called Hot Italian. This one sounds delicious on paper. The toppings included pinched spicy sausage, vinegar peppers, a New York style pizza sauce, hot honey, perorino cheese and shaved Parmesan. I added on pepperoni….because I like pepperoni.
The basic structure of this pizza is pretty perfect. It’s a nice then crust that’s pretty crispy most of the way through. The sauce is a thin, sweet sauce that is just thick enough to hold everything on to the crust. The sausage brought a little bit of spiciness to the party.
The vinegar peppers….were just red and green peppers. I don’t like red and green peppers. I was thinking these were going to be pepperoncini, or jalapeno or some other kind of pickled peppers. The abundance of green and red pepper strips was pretty disappointing. Luckily, they were pretty big pieces so they were easy to pick off.
Despite the pepper disappointment, the pizza from Mootz was really good. I wish I had kept it simple and just ordered a sausage and pepperoni pizza but this combo sound good on paper. If you like these peppers, I would say you would love this pizza.
No matter what kind of pizza you like, I don’t think you’ll have a hard time finding a delicious one at this downtown Detroit pizzeria.
SW Michigan Dining 