Crown Square Pizza opened its doors at 99-04 Rockaway Beach Blvd. on August 13, capping more than a year of delays and permitting headaches for owner Sean Aiken, a Rockaway native who spent years building toward this exact storefront. The counter-service shop brings Detroit-style square pizza to the peninsula for the first time, a Midwestern import that has never had a dedicated home in Rockaway before now.
Aiken signed the lease on the space in March 2025, according to The Wave, which reported that he opened the restaurant only after more than a year of delays and challenges working through city approvals. One milestone arrived on July 24, when the gas was finally turned on and hot water reached the building — a moment Aiken described, per the same account, as an overwhelming feeling of joy. The 800-square-foot space had previously housed Avoid the Day Bookstore & Cafe, a community bookstore and coffee shop that opened in February 2020, and Aiken spent over a year renovating it into a counter-service slice shop, according to The Strong Buzz.
Before Crown Square had a permanent address, Aiken was already known locally as the operator of Seany Pizza, a personal wood-fired Neapolitan pizza stand at the Beach 97th Street Rockaway Bazaar. He also ran a residency at Rockaway Beach Brewery from 2019 to 2021 before opening a boardwalk spot at Beach 97th in 2022, per background reporting cited by Eater NY. That trajectory traces back to 2018, when Aiken began teaching himself pizza-making after buying Ken Forkish's cookbook The Elements of Pizza, later apprenticing at Speedy Romeo in Clinton Hill and receiving mentorship from Paulie Giannone of Paulie Gee's.
Why Detroit-Style, and Why the Name
Detroit-style pizza traces back to 1946, when Buddy's Rendezvous in Detroit, Michigan started baking square pan pies in rectangular forged-steel drip trays borrowed from local automotive plants, according to Buddy's Pizza. Those heavy-duty blue steel industrial pans, per The Wave, gave the style its signature thick, chewy, airy crust and its edge-to-edge caramelized cheese border. Aiken summed up the format simply, telling The Wave that Detroit-style pizza has cheese on top, sauce on top of the cheese, and crispy burnt edges — with stripes of thick tomato sauce added after baking rather than before.
The restaurant's name comes from that caramelized cheese border itself, known in the trade as the frico, which forms along the top edges of a square pie as it bakes and resembles a crown. Authentic versions of the style lean on Wisconsin brick cheese rather than low-moisture mozzarella, letting the high-fat cheese melt down the sides of high-rise pans to form that caramelized edge, according to The Rockaway Times. The outlet notes that while Detroit-style has caught on in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, Crown Square marks the first dedicated version of the format to reach the Rockaway peninsula.
A Knicks-Inspired Room and an Eight-Slice Pie
Inside, the shop was built around a New York Knicks color scheme, with dark-stained oak banquettes, hard maple shelving, blue-and-white square tiled floors, and chairs with pops of orange, aiming for a modern NYC hip-hop aesthetic per The Strong Buzz's description. The Crown Square Pizza sign itself went up in May 2026, designed by Emma Hastil and Chris Cristiano, months before the doors opened.
The menu runs six pizza offerings on square slices and small four-slice pies, alongside large eight-slice pies. Options include a Margherita with fresh basil and grated Parmigiano Reggiano, a Great White with ricotta, roasted garlic, Parmigiano Reggiano, and fresh basil, a Sausage and Onion pie with sweet Italian sausage and roasted onion, a cheese pizza with a house cheese blend and tomato sauce, an Ezzo Cup pepperoni pizza, and the Sweet & Salty by the Sea, topped with Ezzo pepperoni, gorgonzola cheese, and Mike's Hot Honey. Rounding out the menu are buffalo wings, cheesy garlic bread, Caesar and arugula salads, dipping sauces, extra toppings, and soft drinks.
Aiken also plans to expand into breakfast and weekend service, with pastries from Brooklyn-based Native Bakery, breakfast burritos, bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, coffee, and a weekend breakfast pizza on the horizon. That morning and takeout-and-delivery focus fits a business model common to Rockaway's beach economy: with boardwalk concessionaires typically running only in summer, an off-boardwalk storefront designed for year-round orders is what keeps the lights on through the quiet winter months.
Early Reviews and a Year of Anticipation
Crown Square Pizza wasn't a total surprise to the neighborhood by the time it opened. The shop offered public tastings of its square slices at the Rockaway Hotel's second annual Rockaway Food Fest back in November 2025, giving locals a preview nearly a year before the storefront's debut. Early customer response has been enthusiastic: Patrick Clark called the pizza a five-star winner, John Cori gave it two thumbs way up, and Joseph Hanning praised it as absolutely fantastic, adding that he expects Crown Square Pizza will be around for a long time.
The opening also lands amid a broader wave of investment along Rockaway Beach Boulevard and Beach 116th Street, where new year-round food ventures such as Los Tacos de la Playa and Adrienne's Provisions have joined the mix in 2026, according to The Rockaway Times. Detroit-style pizza has been spreading well beyond Michigan and Manhattan in recent months, with Hoodline previously covering Frico's Sacramento debut and a Boston-area shop's move to a seaside Revere Beach spot. For Aiken, though, the milestone is a hyper-local one: after years running a boardwalk stand and pop-up residencies, he now has a permanent, year-round address on the peninsula where he grew up.
