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After last week’s Tuesday night quiz at The Royal, I left with some surprising new facts under my belt.

I learned that Subway Surfers is the most downloaded game on Google Play. I learned that Birkenstock has trademarked the shapes of some of its shoes. I learned that, on the current Rice Bubbles packaging, Snap wears a red shirt. And I learned that the International Radio-Telephony Spelling alphabet – also known as the NATO alphabet – contains five common male names.

But perhaps the most surprising fact that I went home with was that, despite the global popularity of wine bars, Willi’s – the previously mothballed corner bar at The Royal –works better as a pizza joint than it did as a “shrine to the vine”. (Or so said owner and Parker Group director John Parker when he opened Willi’s Wine Bar in 2021.)

Not that Willi’s 1.0 was bad, of course. (I crushed big-time on the prime rib steak sandwich, kangaroo pastrami pikelets, plus the come-hither wine list that favoured local makers.) But in a place like The Royal that already boasted a public bar and debonair dining room doing great vino and contemporary small plates, perhaps there wasn’t quite the need for another space doing a similar offering.

Having written all that, Willi’s Pizza Bar hasn’t strayed far from the Parker Group’s house style. It’s just that this time, the wines – a jaunty edit of new-wave styles – and side dishes have been chosen with the goal of complementing the new star of Willi’s show: Detroit-style deep dish pizza, a hefty slab of cheese and tomato that was originally baked in the rectangular steel pans that were commonplace in Motor City factories and workshops throughout the ’40s.

While Detroit’s finest don’t occupy as much tabletop as your garden variety pizzas, their pizza-per-mouthful ratio blows their circular brethren out of the water.

Reason one: the thick and bready dough. Reason two: its wall-to-wall carpet of cheese, a blend of low-moisture mozzarella and cheddar that surrenders into a molten mass atop the pizza as well as a lacey web of frico along its edges. (Think of those crackly, ochre strands you get on your toasties whenever you “accidentally” overload them with too much cheese.)

Unusually, when building a Detroit-style pizza, the sugo – if the recipe calls for it – is applied last rather than first.

Roughly the size of an iPad, each Willi’s pizza (from $26) is sliced into six calorific, fillings squares and presented on a wire rack to ensure all the crunchy bits remain so. True, these dense pies aren’t as fleet-footed at what you’ll find at Fremantle’s Lola’s or Southern River’s dearly departed Detroit Square Pies, yet their vitals – salt, heat, crunch, fat – are strong and there’s no mistaking that Willi’s namesake are Detroit-style pizzas. Heads up: pizza as rich as this goes a long way, and you don’t need to eat a lot of it, especially if other dishes on the menu have caught your attention.

The same electric pizza oven is also used by chef Jack Timmins and his team to roast half-shell scallops jacked up with a fiery Cafe de Paris butter ($9 each); to put the finishing touches on an ugly-delicious baked carbonara starring ruffles of campanelle pasta ($29; if you’re visiting as a couple, I reckon it’s a case of either-or between pizza or pasta); and to produce the broad-shouldered focaccia ($6) that you might like to use to mop up the zippy dressing in the kingfish crudo ($22) that interweaves slices of fish with arcs of blood orange: a clever, unexpected flourish for a kitchen built primarily for speed.

Sometimes that speed, though, results in dropped stitches. The roasted grapes accessorising the ricotta and hot honey ($14) weren’t so roasted. The loose squiggle of anchovy cream piped onto toast was closer to runny than the advertised “whipped” ($9). The egg yolk in the baked carbonara was overcooked and chalky rather than runny.

While these are but minor glitches in the Matrix, I’d love to see the luxe-casual pizzeria vision dreamed up by the Parker Group brains trust – including culinary director Brendan Pratt and Fleur’s Canadian head chef Logan Place who co-authored Willi’s menu – fully realised.

Then again, according to others’ metrics, one could argue that Willi’s is already there. Thanks to floor staff that work the room with the urgency of people doing a circuit class, service is suitably relaxed yet efficient and obliging. The tantalising aroma of browned cheese that perfumes the 50-seat room is nostalgic-as.

Which paves the way for the show-stealing tiramisu to send guests home on a high. (So light! So big! If the size of a $14 “big scoop” is anything to go by, I suspect the $20 “really big scoop” is delivered via excavator.) It’s a dessert that reiterates how, with the help of a little imagination, old can go to new in a snap.