DropTop Pizza: Where a Passion for pizza, Place, and Experience All Come Together
DropTop Pizza owners Jason Branham and Joe Maino talk about their passion for good food, pizza dough, getting involved in the Saline community, and getting the Match on Main grant. They hope to open their business in late August, 2024.
Jason Branham on Opening a Restaurant
Opening a restaurant is something I’ve always wanted to do. I didn't really realize how much I wanted to do it until one of my mentors, Bud Powell, connected me with a restaurant guy and we started tossing around ideas of what we could do together. That ended up not going anywhere, but it kind of got the juices flowing for me. Then, through a friend of a friend of a friend's, I got a connection for my first start. Somebody I had never met before reached out to me and we opened up a restaurant very quickly.
That was how I started Maiz Mexican Cantina in Ypsilanti. I met Joe because he was one of our first customers at Maiz, back when it was in its first location on Washtenaw Avenue. So, I’ve known him for a while. A few years ago, I reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, I'm thinking about doing something with pizza.’ That’s Joe’s expertise. So we met up and talked about what possibilities could be. The timing wasn’t right, until about a year and a half ago when he reached back out to me and said let’s see how we can collaborate.
Jason on opening a business in Saline
DropTop Pizza will be my first restaurant in Saline, even though I live here. We had a pretty wide net of where we were looking. We were open to places as far out as Novi, Canton, Westland, South Lyon, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor. We were all over the place and then Saline kind of chose us.
The City was working on a business recruiting initiative, and somehow, through the grapevine, Mayor Brian Marl and Community Development Director Ben Harrington heard we were looking to open a new restaurant. They had a couple spots in mind and thought maybe one could work for us. We had originally been looking at another space in Saline, but that fell through. Then they introduced us to our current landlord, John Dunn. Clearly, having a commercial kitchen already in place was a huge money saver. I think maybe I'm attracted to downtowns as well. So, we ended up picking a nice 150, 200 year old building.
Our landlord has been great, he’s given us some concessions, and split some costs on some of the unforeseen issues that come along with historic buildings. And we are getting the Match on Main Grant this year. Any financial support is absolutely amazing at this point. We set a budget that we're probably 70% over right now, mostly due to these unplanned costs, but the Match on Main funds will go towards bathroom upgrades for ADA accessibility entrances. This is going to help us quite a bit to cross the finish line.
The kitchen was a huge selling point though, because we're going to have people prepping and everything's going to be made fresh every day from raw ingredients. We need space for that. And this kitchen just has it. The dining space ended up being a bit smaller than what we had originally planned for, but we had all the kitchen we could imagine.
Jason on Why Pizza?
One of the things the pandemic made me realize is that you can’t go wrong with pizza and tacos. My first business is in tacos and now, the next one's pizza. And I feel like if we can weather a worldwide pandemic, then we're probably okay with this concept. Pizza is never going away, it's only getting bigger. You know, as a percentage, it’s very high up there in terms of dollars in food service. When I started Maiz, I said it was because it was one of the fastest growing cuisines and one of the lowest food costs. But then, also, my wife and I went to a lot of places and could not find Mexican food that we really liked in the area, and we thought there was an opportunity to do something a little bit more fresh from scratch. So it was kind of an intersection of economic viability and my appreciation for good food. We’re hoping to do the same thing here, by bringing another full service concept to life in what could be considered a saturated market while adding some uniqueness to it that will be surprising in some ways.
Jason on the Future
We hope for this to be the first location of many. So we're kind of planting a flag here. The idea is to build a brand that people feel proud to support. Sure, there’s a lot of talk about supporting your community and corporate responsibility and all of those buzzwords, but when it comes down to it, Maiz was able to survive the pandemic because of the support we had built up through our community. And, growing up in Saline, I know it's a very tight knit community. Everybody knows each other. I think there's a huge opportunity to tap into partnerships with the schools that not a lot of businesses are doing right now. I think there’s potential there. And we’ve also said a few times, part of our business plan is being open. Right now, there’s too much closed in downtown. So even if a storefront is occupied, it’s not necessarily open. So that’s going to be a huge part of our plan, and if we can play it right, and we really want to, we want to be community-centered and to give back and be involved.
If you look at lots of brands over time, the ones that have been the most successful have a long view of things. They're less focused on the transactional stuff, and the day to day. Those kinds of things will happen naturally if you're doing the right thing long term, if you have employees that want to work for you, and if you have customers that want to support you because you have products that people feel good about. Then everything kind of takes care of itself. So if that's your focus, I think you can't be anything but successful.
Joe Maino describing what DropTop will be bringing to Saline
We are going to make authentic Detroit style pizza from scratch, with fresh ingredients every day. We're going to make regional American smash burgers. We will have some wings with some interesting flavors and sauces that you may have never seen on wings before. We will have a few fresh salads. All homemade dressings. We will have shakes made with local dairy that you can also add some alcohol to for the adults. I feel like we have a pretty exciting starter menu, almost all of it vegetarian. The whole starter menu. You’ll see things like roasted broccolini with charred lemon and fried artichokes. So expect something upscale and fresh. This is not going to be your typical pizzeria. We're taking pizza and elevating it to give you an experience, you know? So you're going to want to come sit in the restaurant, hang out, and have the whole experience. I think just the nature of pizza is it's a very approachable food. It's meant to be shared.
Joe talks about what got him to this point and how he developed his passion for pizza.
I knew I wanted to do something with Detroit style pizza dough since 2013. When I first at Washtenaw Community college in 2010, I worked at Wetzel’s Pretzels. That was when I first started handling dough. We’d make the pretzel dough fresh all day long. We were doing food preparation and serving customers, so it was a combination of all of it in a small quick service setting. We would make little pizzas at Wetzel’s with the dough, and then I started making pizzas at home, and pizza has always been my favorite food.
I started researching pizza on the internet, and even though there weren’t a lot of resources online at the time, I came across an article about this guy, Shawn Randazzo, and how he became the world pizza champion and won the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas in 2012. This competition has been going on for like 40 years now, and he won the whole show making a Detroit style pizza. He was the first one to do that. In 2012, nobody had really seen this style of pizza on that stage before.
I grew up in Eastpointe, which used to be called East Detroit. That's where Cloverleaf Bar & Restaurant is. That’s where the connection started for me. I was really excited about that. Shawn's pizzeria, Detroit Style Pizza Co was also nearby on the eastside. I thought, let me go try his pizza. And when I tried it, it was like the best square that I had ever had. And I was like, oh my god, this is what I want to do. You know, that rectangular pizza with caramelized cheese around the edge and sauce on top? That's special, that’s unique you know? That's not everywhere else. So I feel like I adopted Shawn’s passion for it as well.
Shawn had started a whole training program on Detroit style pizza after he won the world pizza championship because everyone was asking, how do you make this stuff? The method of preparation and the types of ingredients you use makes a difference. He didn’t want it to be a secret, he wanted Detroit to be in the same conversation as when people talk about New York style or Chicago Style .And now, any new pizzeria that opens up around the country, especially if they have an artisanal consultant, will have a Detroit style pizza on the menu.
When I first started college, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I went to Eastern Michigan University for a year, and then switched to Washtenaw Community College, where I took a career decision making class. I scored high in restaurant management, and it resonated with me because well, I like to cook, and I like to eat. At Wetzel’s I worked myself into a supervisory position, and then into a management position, and then took a position at Zingerman’s Bakehouse. But when I graduated with an Associate’s in Culinary Arts & Hospitality Management I hadn’t yet worked in a full service restaurant. I thought I really needed that experience as both a human being and as a culinary artist. So, I moved over to Zingerman’s Roadhouse and started cooking.
Zingerman’s had a scholarship program for employees who wanted to learn more about specific foods that you were interested in. They helped me realize that I could actually pursue this desire I had to start a pizzeria. I applied for the scholarship, and won it so I could train with Shawn.
After training with Shawn, I ended up partnering with a friend from college who was about to get out of the military. He saw that I was making this pizza at home and he was traveling around the country in the military. And he was like, “Hey, I'm about to get out. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. I think I want to go into the restaurant industry and I think I want to make pizza. Can you teach me how to make the pizza that you've been making?” So we connected. We decided to start a pop up together called Hudson & Packard. I was living in Michigan, and he was living in Poughkeepsie, New York, but I was going out there when we first had it as a pop up. We introduced Detroit style pizza to the Hudson Valley and even though I didn't end up moving out there, he ended up taking it all the way and it's a restaurant now, and he's actually scored in the top three at the International pizza expo the last few years. Last year, he actually won the world's best Detroit style pizza, ultimately with a product that we first created together.
Shawn Randazzo died of brain cancer a few years ago now, but before he died, I worked with him for awhile. I found out that his restaurant was for sale, and when I reached out to him about it, he said he wanted to focus more on the distribution side of his business. He would make mixes and sell his recipe in a bag, so all you had to do was add water. He was also seasoning steel pans, selling frozen pizzas, and even doing consulting. He was either trying to sell his restaurant or needed someone he trusted who could run it with integrity. After a couple hours of conversation, I was like, we should maybe work something out. So, I came in as a partner to run the pizzeria. But he was diagnosed with brain cancer right about that time. When I found that out, I felt like it was my duty to help run that for him just because of all that he had going on. That's obviously a very serious thing to face. I wanted to help alleviate some of the weight of things that he had going on. Within a year, though, he passed away. I stayed for another half a year or so, and made sure the business was in good shape. His family still owns and runs it, trying to carry on his legacy.
But my dream hasn't died, you know. I had always been involved on social media as much as I could, I was one of the first people back in the day posting Detroit style pizza on Instagram and I had a number of followers from that and then there's groups on Facebook now that I've been very verbal in, and I created some YouTube videos that got me a little bit of exposure because I want people to make this style pizza the right way. Because I saw a lot of places around the country where it wasn't being done correctly. The information hadn’t been shared. Shawn was the guy who would really give you the tools and I was interested in that. So people became aware of me through social media because I wanted to spread the word and I think Jason saw that online as well. That led to me doing some consulting and ultimately led Jason into partnering up.
