What comes to mind when you think of pizza?
A pie plastered with pepperoni? Cheese oozing from all sides. A crust that’s buttery and thick or thin and crunchy.
Your mind also may travel to Naples, Italy, which is pizza's modern birthplace. Or conjure up U.S. cities synonymous with the slice: New York, Chicago or Detroit to name a few.
But don’t (you dare) skip over Columbus, with its rich and delicious history.
Did you know Pizza Today Magazine once named Columbus "Pizza Capital of the United States" repeatedly?
Then there’s this recent headline “Columbus is Among America’s Great Pizza Cities.”
We're discussing Columbus' slice of pizza history during this hour of All Sides.
Guest:
- Jim Ellison, author, Columbus Pizza: A Slice of History
Support WOSU 89.7 NPR News during our spring membership drive and you can receive a copy of Columbus Pizza: A Slice of History Book or a Columbus Pizza package as a thank you gift.
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich. It's our membership drive. More about that in just a moment. Quick, what comes to mind when you think of pizza? A pie plastered with pepperoni, cheese oozing from all the sides, a crust that is buttery and thick or thin and crunchy. Your mind may also travel to Naples, Italy, the modern birthplace of pizza, or conjure up U.S. Cities synonymous with a slice, New York, Chicago, Detroit. But don't you dare skip over Columbus. With its rich and delicious history. Did you know that Pizza Today magazine once named Columbus the pizza capital of the United States, repeatedly? And there's the recent headline, Columbus is Among America's Great Pizza Cities. Here to tell us all about it and to make us hungry in the process is Jim Ellison, author of "Columbus Pizza, A Slice of History." Welcome to All Sides, Jim.
Jim Ellison: Thanks, Amy, I'm excited to be here.
Juravich: So you have a well-researched book all about Columbus pizza and there is no food more infused in the character of our city than pizza. So I guess I never thought of Columbus in that way but what led you to that conclusion that you say that there's no food more infused in the characters of our cities?
Ellison: I would say a lifetime of experience. I'm a rare Columbus native. I think Columbus is largely a city of transplants, but I've lived here all my life and this is my lived experience of pizza. I'm also a former food writer. So I think there's three things that you can be sure that people in Columbus will have opinions about. The weather, the Buckeyes, and pizza. So knowing this would be a topic people cared about and like watching years of. Of internet discussions about pizza, what is good pizza, what's not good pizza. So I knew it would be a great topic. I knew there would be great stories. And it was something I really wanted to share with folks and really have them kind of have more insight and respect for this really unique thing that we have in our city.
Juravich: Yeah, so Chicago has deep dish style. New York style pizza is a thin crust and wide, and it's meant to be folded. Detroit pizza is that rectangular pan pizza with a thick crust. So I want you to describe for me Columbus pizza.
Ellison: Gotcha, all right, so combination of things make it uniquely Columbus style. It's thin crust, so similar to tavern pizza that you'd find in Chicago. It is a yeast-risen dough, so you don't just make your dough and throw it in the oven, you're gonna let the dough rise over a period of time. It's cooked in a deck oven, not a conveyor oven, so there's a certain skill set, a certain heat temperature that you need to have in the over. Toppings are edge to edge, right? So think about those images of Columbus style pizza, Massey's Donatos. You see an image of pizza and you almost can't see the pizza for all the pepperoni and toppings on it. So that's critical. It doesn't really have a crust ring. It has a nominal crust ring or just goes right to the edge. The sauce leans a little bit sweeter. So it's not kind of like that really strict kind of bitterness that you'll find in some sauces on the East Coast.
Here's the big thing. This is sometimes the most controversial part of Columbus style pizza. It is tavern cut or party cut. We'll probably explore that more later, but it's cut into squares or rectangles.
Juravich: I've never heard, okay, the square cut. That's what I was waiting for you to get to. You were listing all those things. Okay, continue. So.
Ellison: So yeah, that is, we talk to people on the East Coast and that immediately causes them just to be enraged. It's like, how dare you? This cracker thin, cracker like tasteless pizza is cut into squares. That's like how dare, right? Rage comes from that. Our pizza is gonna lean towards provolone or provolon mozzarella mix instead of mozzarella cheese. And that's, it's subtle but you get a distinct flavor that comes from that. And the other thing that is very much a Columbus thing and has been for many decades, is our love of pepperoni, right? Pepperoni is the top topping nationwide, but Columbus was really the first place where pepperoni was a dominant topping. And again, when you look at pizzas that we have in town that are very proud of, we have 100 or 150 slices of pepperone on our pizza, it is very a much Columbus thing.
Juravich: Okay, wow. Well, this is our membership drive on 89.7 NPR News and we have two wonderful thank you gifts to tell you about today. The first is a great book written by our guest. For nearly a century, Columbus has been serving up pizza by the tray and by the slice and in the book, "Columbus Pizza, A Slice of History," author Jim Ellison tells the story of the city's signature style from the 1930s roots to its rise to a national standout. This book is 160 pages of local flavor and history. Get yours today when you support WOSU. Start a sustaining gift of $10 a month at wosu.org.
The second gift we're offering is that you get the book I was just talking about. Plus you get opportunity to take a special pizza tour. This is your WOSPizza package and it brings the pizza experience to life. You'll get a gift card to Columbus Food Adventures. Good for two on an Italian village pizza tour. And you'll get a copy of the book, "Columbus Pizza, A Slice of History" by Jim Ellison. Discover how a century of local tradition shaped Columbus into a pizza capital. For the pizza food tour, you'll be on a walking tour of Italian village and the short north. You'll start in Italian village, the origin of some of the most well-known names in pizza in Columbus today. And then you'll head to the short North and you'll enjoy several local independent pizza places. And you will be led on this experience by an experienced guide.
So that is a gift card for the Columbus Food Adventures Pizza Tour and a copy of the book, "Columbus Pizza, A Slice of History." Start your sustaining gift today at $15 a month and get that great pizza package at wosu.org. And remember that listeners across our community are stepping up to support WOSU right now, choosing to give monthly so the service stays strong and reliable. When you join them as a sustainer, you become a part of what makes everything you hear on the radio possible. So make a gift today at www.osu.org.
So Jim, I wanted to get back to that square cut thing because I thought you were going to, you know, you listed off all of those different styles with Columbus pizza. I thought it was much, much more simple than that. I thought, it was just the square cut. Am I just naive?
Ellison: You're not naive, yours is the shared experience of most people that live in Columbus and actually the country. But it's all these combination of things that come together. So I think for pizza, a lot of people it's like beer. So for some people, beer is beer. For other people it like, well there's ales and lagers. And then there's those people that are really detailed and they can tell you all the different types of IPAs that exist, right? So this kind of definition of Columbus pizza is kind of lives in that space in between the folks that are very detailed about all the. Varieties of IPAs, and it's something that there are subtle things that make it different, but they are special and unique. So the cousin of Columbus-style pizza is Chicago Tavern-style pizza. So very similar, looks similar if you're just looking at it, but tasting it side by side, it's very different.
Juravich: So that's different than deep dish. Exactly, yeah.
Ellison: Exactly. Yeah. And residents of Chicago would tell you that deep dish pizzas for the tourists and the tavern style Which they just don't call it taverns down Chicago. They just call it pizza. It's like this is the real Chicago pizza So again, very similar. I believe they're definitely cousins Chicago and Columbus But I really feel that Chicago Tavern style pizza was a strong influence on what Columbus style is in part because of Jimmy Massey Massey's pizza Grew up in Chicago, lived there for 40 years. He was a baker. He had several friends that had pizzerias. So I think that's where part of the influence comes.
Juravich: So I also found out from you, because I didn't know this, that Columbus style pizza now has its own Wikipedia page. Yes. So that makes it legit, right?
Ellison: If it's on the internet or the radio, it's true. Of course.
Juravich: So what does that mean? It's like, if you type in Columbus style pizza, now you can go to this Wikipedia page. I mean, I read it over. It explains it the way you just did. I mean all the different steps to it. Did you write the page? Did you write the page?
Ellison: I did not write the page. I've been accused of that. I am cited frequently in the page. Yeah. I'm not responsible for it. I don't know who is, but I thank them for that. Yeah. Because this has been a very contentious discussion for five or 10 years. If you like, anytime an article comes out. So you referenced, I think, the "food and wine" article that came out earlier this year. There was a great one from "Eater" also within the last couple of months. "New York Post" had an article about Columbus style pizza. Which just the rage just like came through, like how dare they call Columbus a great pizza city? Like that's not good pizza.
But we need this definition of it so you can tell Columbus style pizza from something else. It is something special. I feel it's an endangered species and I want to preserve it because it's the story of kind of like, I think local radio is important. I think global restaurants are important too. And we really need to respect the differences and the hard work that's required to make this style of pizza because it special and unique to Columbus.
Juravich: Why is it an endangered species?
Ellison: It is more labor intensive to make a columbus style pizza over a standard generic pizza. These are independent businesses that are in their second or third generation. And we know, especially in the restaurant industry, but for any type of business, they don't typically make it to the fourth generation, like that carry on its hard work, its weekends, its evenings, margins can be very narrow, the restaurant, especially pizza is the most competitive. Of any type of food-based businesses. So a lot of these places have owners who are in their 50s or 60s getting ready to retire and they don't have that family member or somebody that cares as much of the business as they do that wants to carry it on. So it is something that I think we need to really respect and preserve and appreciate and make that extra effort to support these local businesses.
Juravich: Is a Donato's or a Massey's big enough that they can carry the load for the smaller places? Because Donato is a chain for, you know, right? But can it take Columbus style pizza bigger?
Ellison: Well, I think it has in some ways. Wonderful company, it goes back to 1963. Family does so much to support this community in many ways. They're just a great, very principled business that really follows through its values. So I think today, Donatos has somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 locations, and they're also partnered with Red Robin, so they actually have almost national exposure for their pizzas going through those restaurants. Yeah, I have family in-
Juravich: I have a family in Pittsburgh that said they were eating Donato's pizza and I was like where and they said a Red Robin, right? Yeah.
Ellison: Massey's is smaller, around 12-ish locations, most of them in central Ohio. There's one in South Carolina, I believe.
Juravich: Oh, only 12, I thought there were more, okay.
Ellison: Yeah, maybe more, but under 20, for sure, but they definitely have a strong presence, but they're not as densely spread around Columbus, right? So like a lot of people have heard of Massey's, but there's never been one because there's not one nearby. I see. Both businesses are great, Donato's, I would describe it in a recent interview as the Bud Light of Columbus style pizza, right. So like, it's accessible to everyone. It is consistent and it's really hard to make a pizza consistent.
That was Jim Grody's dream. He knew that he did not want to expand past one location. If you couldn't make sure that every pizza you had was always the same and always consistent. So it takes a lot of things to get that consistency and Donatos does it great, but you lose a little bit of that kind of local pizzeria connection, the little inconsistencies that come, those little like air pockets and things like that. So like Donatos a lot, a lot respect for him, But it's. Quite the full Columbus style experience outside of the city.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. This is our membership drive. We count on listeners for the most important part of our budget. We rely on listener support to bring you great programs every day. Make a gift right now at wosu.org or you can call us 866-897-9678. I wanna say thank you to Sheri Asbell from Grove City and also Willard and Elizabeth Blind from Lancaster. Thank you so much for your gifts today.
Take a bite out of Columbus history with a WOSU pizza package. Enjoy a gift card for two to an Italian village pizza tour from Columbus Food Adventures. This tour is led by an expert guide. It'll take you to several pizza places in Italian village and the short north. You'll try lots of styles of pizza, Neapolitan, Detroit, New York style pizza. Plus, if you pick this pizza package as your thank you gift, you'll also get the book, "Columbus Pizza, A Slice of History" by Jim Ellison. This is 160 pages that looks at how local pizza evolved from the 1930s to today. Start your gift of $15 a month right now and you can get the pizza package.
And this is a great time to support public radio. It's no secret that public radio has had some changes in the way we are funded, but we are still here. We are still hear thanks to listener support. So if you listen to All Sides every day, then this is the perfect day to support the show. The team at All Sides works hard to bring you a diverse range of topics. We cover the news of the day. We cover long-term trends. We take on national issues with a local perspective. We are here for you, a daily local talk show. If that's important to you, now is the time to act and make a gift and support this show.
And you can get some great pizza related thank you gifts when you give today at www.osu.org. I wanna say thank you quickly to Donnie Austin from Worthington. He writes, we love Columbus pizza. Our business, Aardvark Wine and Beer, is thankfully just across the street from JT's. And he also adds, Jim is awesome. So, a friend of yours. Thank you, Donnie, for your gift of support. We appreciate that. What is, when he says he's across the street from jt's, I don't know that one. What's that?
Ellison: So in the Linworth area 161, so that kind of western edge of Worlington, Donnie's great person. The love is both ways there. Also a wine guy. I've had many alcohol and pizza adventure with him over the years. JT's pizza is really highly respected here in Columbus. One of the most, when you look at like the top 10 or their favorite list- I'm sorry, I don't know it. Here, I'm writing it down. Try JT. Come up consistently, really since it opened. They recently opened another second location in the Grandview area. So very good, great bar pizza. What I really like about JT's is they do a monthly special that's a little exotic. So like a Pad Thai pizza, things like that. But Donnie is probably the greatest JT's fan on this planet.
Juravich: Well, then, and Donnie apparently is a public radio fan, too, and we appreciate that. You can join Donnie and make your gift today, 866-897-9678 or wosu.org. A March article in "Eater" magazine was titled, "Columbus is Among America's Great Pizza Cities," and it quotes you. It talks about how Columbus pizza is more affordable than its bigger city counterparts at roughly $20 a pie compared to $30 in New York City or L.A. The price can go up and down depending on how many toppings you get on it, obviously, but is that true? Is Columbus pizza priced really well?
Ellison: Um, everybody's going to feel that it's too expensive. That's the nature of our economy right now. But when we look at other large metropolitan cities, it is generally price lower. So it is, it has a good value. Pizza is in general is a great value, right? It's something you can share. It's a family meal. Um, you don't have to need a lot of things to go with it. You eat it with your hands. You don't need plates if you, if you want to be a savage like me, but it is it is less expensive here.
Again, most of our pizzeria owners in Columbus are independent operators, right? Not large chains. And they're very focused on price because they recognize if my pizza goes up a dollar, I'm probably going to lose some customers to the competitors, right. So they really work very hard. Again, we're talking narrow margins in the business of like being very cost-conscious and trying to make sure that their food, their pizza is a good value for their customers.
Juravich: Now, if you go to like a place like a Pizza Hut, I'm sorry to mention these, Pizza Hut Domino's, even like a Romeo's Pizza, will they square cut it for you if you live in Columbus only here?
Ellison: It depends on the chain, but even when you're doing online ordering, you will see this in the apps, where you have that option to get it tavern cut or square cut, usually listed as tavern cuts. So that is an option at some places. Vice versa, if you are so offended by the square, or what we call center cut for the rectangles, many places will allow you to have it in triangle slices instead of the squares.
Juravich: Now, when I moved here, which is 20 years ago now, but I had never seen a square cut pizza before, right? This was new to me. But then becoming a mom and having like kids with friends over, the square cut is awesome. I mean, it is like the perfect size for little kid hands to eat the pizza properly. I don't know who decided when to square cut it. Like what, do you know the person who was like, let's do it differently? Let's do it differently.
Ellison: In all food history, it's always hard to say who was the first, or where did it happen. But the lore strongly supports that the first square cut pizza was in Chicago, probably in the late 1940s. And it was as a bar snack. So you have somebody coming in after work. They're grabbing a beer. They're not quite ready for dinner. They have to head home. But that little small square, make sure that everybody gets a little bit of pizza, instead of just the big burly guys getting the gigantic slices. So it's democracy in action, is the square cut pizza.
Juravich: Got it. You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. This is our membership drive. We're talking all about pizza today with Jim Ellison, author of "Columbus Pizza, A Slice of History." And if you can give a gift of support right now, you'll be helping All Sides and 89. 7 NPR news stay strong in the weeks and months to come. All Sides has been covering it all. You know that the news cycle can be relentless. You listen to NPR and WOSU to learn something new and understand what's happening in the world around you. Make a gift today, show your support at wosu.org. Thank you to Diana from Columbus. Thank you so much for your gift of support, Diana.
The story of pizza in Columbus is one of tradition, innovation, and local pride. In the book, "Columbus Pizza, A Slice of History," Jim Ellison traces it all. From early pioneers to thin tavern style slices, the city is known for today. This book is a deep dive into a hometown favorite. You can get the book. For $10 a month as a sustaining member. Get your very own copy. And remember that a monthly gift helps power local news and the programs and conversations you rely on.
If $15 a month works into your budget, you could support the station and this show and explore one of Columbus's favorite foods on and off the plate. It's the WOSU pizza package and it includes a gift card for two people to attend the Italian Village Pizza Tour with Columbus Food Adventures. Along with the book that we were just talking about, "Columbus Pizza, A Slice of History." So you get the book and you get to tour. The pizza tour starts in Italian Village and it has several stops in the short north as well. It's a walking tour. You will be able to select the date you want to go from the Columbus Food Adventures website after you make your gift to WOSU. So be able take the pizza tour, get the the book we're talking about this hour, make a gift of $15 a month and support public radio. This is truly a win win. Give it double osu.org.
In Chillicothe, there's an Italian American restaurant known as um, I think is it Lovita? Do you know that one? I've heard of it.
Ellison: I've heard of it, but I've not visited it.
Juravich: OK, it posted on social media recently that it had to adjust its hours because it earned highest honors in an international pizza expo pizza challenge and that it gained more followers, new customers. And it's cheese pizza, one 25th best cheese pizza in the world. I mean, how I if you're not familiar with it, we can't we don't we don't need to dig too deep into it, but what is it? What is it like to like? How do you win best pizza in the world?
Ellison: Oh, it's huge. So there is a Columbus connection to this. So the Columbus Pizza Expo, which was a big it was the Columbus pizza and ice cream show for many years, disappeared for about a decade came back just this past year. But they have competitions with from pizzeria owners from all over the country and actually North America, like it's a regional competition. If you do well in that competition, you in advance to the Las Vegas competition, which is the big one. People that do well in that competition, then go to Italy to compete for like best pizza in the world in different categories.
So we have several award winners here in Columbus. Brad Rocco from Bexley Pizza Plus won this many years. When you get an award like this, when you get the press and the notoriety that comes with it, it drives people to your door. So.
Juravich: Pizza explosion. Yeah. Yeah
Ellison: Yeah, Vic St. John, who was on your show recently, right? He popped into late night slaves for a couple hot seconds and the sauce that they have they're very special unicorns
Juravich: Oh, you're talking about love is blind love is Blind made Mikey's late-night slice sauce, right? Very popular
Ellison: It's a small little bit, you know drives themselves quickly same thing for Brad Mama Mimi's pizza, which is a take-and-bake place here in Columbus. They won an award in Italy also drove traffic to them Rob Martinez is a famous TikTok food Videographer, I suppose he had an incredible video about TAT restaurante here in columbus just over a year ago It went viral over a million hits In a very short period of time and it drove a lot of business to this restaurant that I love that's almost a hundred years old.
Juravich: Well, that's a good segue. So your book says the first slice of pizza was served in Columbus as early as 1934 at TAT Ristorante de Familia. So that restaurant has an interesting history. Can you tell us how pizza gained a foothold there?
Ellison: Yeah, first, we believe the first Italian restaurant in Columbus are among the first. It's the oldest restaurant in Columbus. It's going to be 100 years in 2029. So let's hope they make it there, right? They're great people. But the first place that we know that serve pizza, and we have documentation, we have a menu from 1934 that has pizza on there. So that's a big deal. Again, most food history is legend and lore and memory. We didn't have Instagram. And and blogs and stuff. So you have to find an artifact like an old menu which is hard to do. Luckily I have some research skills so that helped. So yeah it's TAT. We should probably describe the name real quick because that throws people off.
So new immigrant family in Columbus trying to think of a catchy name for their restaurant. Italian food is still a little exotic at the time. So TAT was the Transcontinental Air Transport Company which was the first. Coast-to-coast airline in the United States. It started in 1929. So it'd be kind of calling the restaurant TAT Restaurante would be the equivalent of like calling it the TikTok restaurant or the internet or the data center, like whatever, that hot topic thing. So the airline owners popped in for some food a year or so later and said, hey, what's this with TAT? And the owner at the time said, oh, TAT stands for take any table. So, but there's a neat story. When, and I hope everybody goes to that restaurant, they have an incredible mural in the hallway of the restaurant by the office and bathrooms that tells the story of TAT restaurant. So I think they outlasted the airline. And I think that that mural tells a story about that great bit of Columbus history and the restaurant. I like taking pictures.
Juravich: I like take any tables. Yeah. Um, so you mentioned that it's hard for these restaurants to make it to the fourth generation. Are they on that generation of the family?
Ellison: Yes, they are. The children are high school, I think early college, very much part of the East Side. The whole family is huge supporters of the East Side, but will they continue? Again, it's hard work, it is evenings and weekends, especially when there is more than one voice in a business. It's hard to all go in the same direction, so I hope they continue. And there's other places that has not survived that transition, and we've seen some of those changes recently.
Juravich: Um, another, the first pizzeria in Columbus you write was Romeo's.
Ellison: Yes, right. Not to be confused with the chain that's growing now.
Juravich: That's what I was going to say, so it's not the same as the chain of pizza, but you write that pizza was such a foreign world at the time that a local columnist in 1951 spelled it out phonetically for readers, like he was writing pizza and he wrote pete, like p-e-t-e, so people didn't know the word pizza?
Ellison: No, it just wasn't common now. We had a decent sized Italian American community in in the 1950s in Columbus It was still small like just segmented to certain small neighborhoods in Columbus So Italian food was still kind of a novelty pizza definitely had not been heard of through most of the country at that time so That was just a very thing that you really had to explain to people and what I think helped with the spread of pizza and the growth in Columbus because this really in the Midwest.
This was one of the first cities that had any type of pizza presence, was teenagers. So that Romeo's location was located at the intersection of North Star and Fifth Avenue. So in between Upper Arlington and Grandview, growing communities, close to two high schools, a pizza's cut into squares, right? So if you wanted to have rapid adaptation, that's your target market, right, of teenagers that had this new concept of spendable money and free time. So you pour your money together. You go to get a pizza that's novel, unique, interesting, something that's easy to share. So that helped fuel the growth.
Juravich: So did was the author worried that people wouldn't know how to say something with two Z's in it like absolutely. Yeah, there's
Ellison: Absolutely, yeah. There's a fun video from like Canadian broadcasting in the 1950s. It's similar. She's like, I want to show you this recipe for this interesting dish called pizza. Again, having to explain this novel thing. I mean, think about today, you know, when you look at the diversity of foods in Columbus now, like I'd have to pronounce certain Indian dishes that I love or Somali dishes, things like that. So it's just that education component.
Juravich: And the duo behind Romeo's is Jim Massey and Romeo, is it Suri? Suri, yeah. Suri. Suri Suri Suri
Ellison: And one of my challenges in researching the book is, his name was often written as S-I-R-I instead of S- I-R I-J. And when I finally added the J to it, it helped my research so much I could find the right person to talk to.
Juravich: Okay, so Jimmy, Jimmy Massey, that name is familiar. So Massey would go on to start with his brother, Massey's Pizza in Whitehall. I mean, is this the Massey we know? This is the-
Ellison: This is the Massey's that we know, different owners now. So he sold to Guido Casa, who was a big kind of pizza. Presence in Columbus in 1963 and then he turned it over to his son Philip in 1971 and then he tried to grow the business. That didn't quite happen. They had some financial problems and his cousins wound up buying him from him and those are the Polones who are the as an owners today.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. This is our membership drive. You're running out of time to make a gift this hour. Support public radio at wosu.org or call 866-897-9678. I wanna say thank you to Dan Roberts from Westerville. Thanks, Dan. We also heard from Julie Kennel from Columbus. Julie, thank you so much for giving and say hi to Grant for me. You can make a give right now and join Julie and join Dan and you'll be supporting public radio.
If you listen to All Sides every day, then you know this show is committed to producing in-depth, focused conversations on issues important to Columbus and central Ohio. You hear from our weekly reporter round table every Monday. On Thursdays, you hear our segment called Fascinating Ohio, where we introduce you to neighbors from the Buckeye State with an interesting story to tell. You hear facts straight from experts and newsmakers. We certainly have a pizza expert in the room today. You are learning a lot, you know it. Every time you listen to the show, you learn something new. So if you rely on that, make a gift at wosu.org or 866-897-9678.