Watertown’s Pizza Champ

By John Andrews 

Sean Dempsey's innovative pizzas are turning heads in Watertown, where he owns Dempsey's Brewery, Pub and Restaurant.

“Another 30 seconds,” Sean Dempsey says as he slides an Oktoberfest pizza back inside a 550-degree oven. A quick tap on the crust hadn’t produced the light knocking sound he wanted, indicating that it wasn’t quite done. There’s no timer in sight, but exactly half a minute later the pizza comes out and onto the counter, where Dempsey applies a brush of butter around the outside edges of the crust along with a little sea salt. Then come crumbles of sharp port cheddar cheese, a dash of oregano and tiny dollops of sweet lingonberries to complement the spicy sausage, dilly sauerkraut and spicy brown mustard.

This is not the simple cheese, pepperoni or sausage pizza that many of us have eaten all our lives. Dempsey’s daring creations are earning him a reputation among the best pizza makers in the world. And they might make him a pizza champion.

Dempsey was there the day in 1999 when his father Bill opened the Highland Laddie in a historic building on Watertown’s Broadway Avenue. Bill had long dreamed of a Celtic-themed pub; he occasionally donned a kilt and played bagpipes for customers. (The elder Dempsey was a pipe major for the Glacial Lakes Pipe and Drum Corps.)

Dempsey’s Brewery, Pub and Restaurant, as it became known in 2001, is largely unchanged 25 years later.

Flags still hang from the ceiling, a large mural of a castle in the Scottish highlands adorns the western dining room wall and its menu of burgers, steaks and pasta remains as popular as ever. But as Sean worked his way up through nearly every job in the restaurant — from bus boy to dishwasher to server to cook — it eventually became clear that he would have a future in the family business. He just needed to find a way to make his own mark.

Inspiration struck in 2013 when the Dempseys attended the International Pizza Expo and Conference in Las Vegas. It’s a trade show for all things pizza, where chefs explore new toppings, ingredients and baking methods. The Dempseys had begun offering pizzas a few years earlier, and like all good business owners, wanted to learn as much as they could.

Dempsey launched Danger von Dempsey's, an offshoot of the original Watertown restaurant, to focus on pizza and craft beer.

“It was an eye-opener, because in my mind pizza had always been this dough you make, you put some cheese and sauce on it, bake it, cut it and you eat it when you’re drunk and it’s great,” he says. “But at the Pizza Expo I saw the different styles and how you could express yourself. You could get really creative with this and do things that other people haven’t done. That’s what sparked my interest.”

A year later, Dempsey traveled to San Francisco to study with Tony Gemigani, an international pizza champion who had launched the International School of Pizza and the United States School of Pizza, both under the Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli, an Italian school offering the most complete training of pizza chefs in the world. He is now the only certified pizzaiola (pizza maker) in South Dakota.

With that boost in experience, he went all-in on pizza. The kitchen at Dempsey’s took on the air of a science lab as he tweaked dough recipes and topping combinations. More importantly, he had to convince South Dakotans to trust his pizzas, a challenge in a region where national chains are the norm and people passionately debate the merits of pineapple on pizza.

“The first year was a nightmare,” he says. “I’d just gotten back from Tony’s school, and we bought a $20,000, two-ton double decker oven. We built an entire pizza room for it, and then when we started making pizzas people weren’t really wild about them. People like a lot of toppings and they want a large serving. Our pizzas were different, and they were a little more expensive. We spent a lot of time emphasizing the use of Italian ingredients, but still it was a solid year of educating. Why would you pay $18 for this pizza when you could get one at Domino’s for $6?”

Eventually customers warmed to his unique creations. That behemoth of an oven now cooks as many as 700 pizzas a week, ranging from a simple margherita featuring his house red sauce, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil and tomatoes to his more daring “pizza of the week.” The Argentine Horizon features roasted red pepper hummus, mozzarella, Argentine shrimp, red peppers, chives, cilantro and a squeeze of lemon. The Fisherman’s Hangover has shrimp, crab, shredded carrots, garlic, onions and lemon zest. The French Onion includes roast beef, French-fried onions, mushrooms and shallots.

About five minutes inside a 550-degree oven, give or take a few seconds, should give the pizza's crust the perfect color and texture.

His pizzas are also turning heads around the globe. In 2017, the year after he took over ownership of the restaurant from his father, who is now enjoying retirement, Dempsey began competing at the International Pizza Challenge, part of the annual Las Vegas expo. He took 10th place in the traditional division and first in the Northwest region. He won the Northwest twice more, in 2018 and again in 2022, a year in which he also finished .02 points behind the overall winner in the traditional division.

Which brings us back to the Oktoberfest pizza. This is his 2024 competition pizza, which he presented to judges in Las Vegas in March and will bring to Naples, Italy in June, where he’ll compete internationally as a member of the United States Pizza Team, earned by virtue of his wins in Las Vegas. It was still a work in progress when we visited Dempsey’s kitchen in February, where he practiced baking it under competition conditions.

The Oktoberfest was inspired by a celebration he attended with relatives in Austria. While the original components are still there, he has tweaked the ingredients, including a sauerkraut made with whiskey and dill. He tried muenster cheese instead of the port cheddar, but it wasn’t strong enough. Same with the lingonberries blended into a drizzle. He’s experimenting with tiny pieces of Granny Smith apple and a German beer reduction drizzled over the top.

There’s beer in the dough, too, a constantly evolving combination of high-gluten flour and rye that ferments for four days and sits out for 10 hours before it’s stretched into a crust. Sausage slices are crisped in the oven before being placed on the pizza along with the German mustard base, mozzarella, red onion rings and sauerkraut.

The pizza goes into the oven for two and a half minutes, then is rotated and cooked another two and half minutes, give or take a few seconds based on the crust’s color and texture. After a minute of rest, he adds the crumbles of sharp port cheddar cheese and spoons of lingonberries, all arranged so that a single bite includes every component and the slices — cut with pizza shears to protect the integrity of the crust — are uniformly topped.

Dempsey hopes the Oktoberfest is enough to put him over the top in competitions this year. Even if it’s not, South Dakotans have already demonstrated their willingness to “try weird things on pizza,” as he puts it. His Danger von Dempsey’s, an offshoot of the original Dempsey’s featuring pizzas and craft beer, has expanded to Aberdeen, Brookings and the Watertown airport. Sauerkraut, shrimp — and maybe even pineapple — on pizza is here to stay.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.