Detroit pizza hangout Pie Sci plans to bring its culinary science lab to Oak Park by year’s end.
On Wednesday, the pizza spot announced plans to open a second location at 8140 W. Nine Mile Rd.
“So… you may have heard, come the end of this year we are expecting a new addition to the Pie-Sci family!” a post on the shop’s Instagram page reads. “Pie-Sci 2, aka Pie-Sci North, aka Pie-Sci Oak Park will be arriving later this year.”
Pie Sci has a knack for putting things on pizza that don’t really make sense but somehow end up being a flavor party in your mouth — the good kind. (Last year, it cooked up a “Metro Thymes: Cabbage Love” pizza topped with shredded carrots and cabbage soup drizzle.) Plus they make vegan pizza that actually doesn’t suck.
Pie Sci founder Jeremy Damaske tells Metro Times the new location will be carryout-only and will have the same menu and weekly specials as the Detroit outpost. He also says the goal is eventually to have three Pie Sci locations, but the third spot hasn’t been secured yet.
The goal is to open the second Pie Sci by Thanksgiving, but Damaske suspects it will be in winter, depending on how long construction takes.
He says he envisioned the second location being somewhere that’s “populated, but not too crazy developed yet.”
“Like instead of Ferndale, Oak Park,” he says. “You go down Nine Mile and it’s just packed with businesses and really cool stuff, and then you hit Oak Park and it just kind of becomes like a dead zone. So this is exactly what I was thinking for number two, and the owners actually live in Oak Park so when they got an opportunity to buy these buildings, they jumped on it pretty quickly.”
The Nine Mile Road location is located not far from downtown Ferndale, in a line of shops that includes the storefront of local streetwear company The Wealthy Brand.
Damaske was the original owner of Pie Sci but sold the business to his landlords Jim and Jamie Geary a year ago. He continues to work for the shop, however, including coming up with ideas for some of its offbeat pizzas, running Pie Sci’s social media, and helping to open the new location.
“I sold the restaurant because the pandemic was wearing me down,” he says. “I’ve got two kids. It was like, I don’t really want to be 45 and die of a heart attack stressing myself out, so I was gonna sell it and then my landlord was like don’t do that. He was the one that originally let me start as a pop-up in the Woodbridge Pub [next door], so it was really keeping it in the family that way. He also gave me the opportunity to still work for him, because I need to work.”
The Oak Park Pie Sci is part of two buildings acquired by the Gearys that were part of a former tire shop. The building Pie Sci is in will have the pizza place on one side and a separate bakery and retail space on the other. A new bar called Hansen’s Hall is opening in the second building, across the street at 8210 W. Nine Mile Rd.
“At first, this will be like moreso an offshoot of Pie Sci one, which is still gonna be where you’ll want to go if you want to get dine-in, or the brunch pizzas,” he says.
Pie Sci’s first location opened in 2016 in the Woodbridge neighborhood at 5163 Trumbull St., Detroit. Damaske says Wyandotte and Ypsilanti have been thrown around as possible locations for a third Pie Sci, but it’s all just talk for now.
While we’ve always considered Pie Sci a stoner pizza place, Damaske says that wasn’t his intention.
“It’s more like DIY ethic and punk. It has a little bit of grit to it, but it’s also super inviting and friendly, and family-oriented, too,” he says. “There’s obviously the whole Bob’s Burgers reference, you know, with the goofy names and seasonal menu items. That originally came from Woodbridge Pub where we started popping up because they always changed their menu, so we always had different stuff to work with to try different things on pizza.”
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