Little Caesars

Pizza! Pizza! — and it all started with a $10,000 life savings and a single store. In 1959, Mike and Marian Ilitch, both children of Macedonian immigrants, opened a little pizzeria called Little Caesar’s Pizza Treat in the Detroit suburb of Garden City. (“Little Caesar” was Marian’s pet name for Mike.) People told them pizza was a fad.

Instead it became the world’s largest carryout pizza chain — and made the Ilitches a Detroit dynasty. Mike used the pizza fortune to buy the Red Wings and then the Tigers (from his pizza rival Tom Monaghan of Domino’s, no less), restore the Fox Theatre, and reshape downtown with Comerica Park and Little Caesars Arena. The original Garden City store served its last Hot-N-Ready in 2018, but the empire it spawned is stamped all over the city. Not bad for a fad.