Mootz Pizzeria + Bar

Mootz is the pizza half of The Belt‘s food-and-drink equation — a pizzeria and bar on Library Street with an entrance right off the alley, slinging old-school round pies to a devoted crowd (a 4.8 Google rating across thousands of reviews is not a normal number for pizza). The greatest-hits list writes itself: garlic knots of fresh-baked dough tossed in garlic butter and pecorino, meatballs with a following of their own, the Popeye white pizza with spinach, garlic, and ricotta, and the Hot Italian with sausage, vinegar peppers, and hot honey. Round it out with appetizers, salads, desserts, and a full bar, and it’s the proper sit-down meal of the block — the anchor tenant of the alley’s food story.

We walked past on our mural stroll doing the universal window-gaze of the not-yet-fed, and it’s been on our list since — Visit Detroit ranks it among the best pizza in the city, and the alley-side entrance means it’s mural-gazing to marinara in about ten steps. The obvious pre-Deluxx Fluxx dinner, or the carb anchor of any Belt evening that plans to run long.