Thanks to Massey’s passion for and proselytization of thin dough and introduction of pepperoni, Columbus pizzerias had developed a distinct style and taste all their own: thin, yeasted crust; a sweet leaning sauce; provolone cheese; generous toppings; party-cut, rectangular pieces; and for some, a cornmeal dusted crust so the dough wouldn’t stick to the deck oven surface.

By Matthew Meduri 

The best pizza in the world, as everybody knows, no longer exists. It is the pizza of your childhood. That first magical bite sets the flavor, which you spend the rest of your life attempting to recapture.

—Ruth Reichel

In the heart of the heart of the country, the pizza is much like the land: flat and cut into squares. Although pan pizza is as ubiquitous in the Midwest as it is in any other part of the country, the thin-crust pizza found throughout the Ohio River Valley as far north as Minnesota, west through Iowa, and southish to St. Louis is unique to the heartland. The crust varies in thickness, texture, and chew, ranging from a crisp, yet tender, flatbread to an ultra-thin flaky, cracker crunch, firm enough to support the generous toppings that span over the entire surface, leaving no cornicione, or the raised outer rim, and an extra crispy edge.

Often referred to as tavern-style pizza, this dish originated, as most food historians agree, in Chicago taverns post-Prohibition sometime in the late 1930s, early 1940s. First complimentary and then later sold, these thin, small square pieces accompanied pints of beer and glasses of wine to encourage imbibing but discourage satiation. But just like the Italians who brought pizza from New York to Chicago, the trend of thin crust, party-cut pizza migrated to neighboring cities and states. Each locale—Milwaukee, St. Louis, the Quad Cities, the Twin Cities, and even Columbus, Ohio—took this pizza and, given their specific foodways, altered it further. What originated as cheap or free working-class bar food became a new and unique regional style of pizza.

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At the turn of the century, more than 11,000 Italians lived in Ohio. Most of them had settled in Northeast Ohio and along Lake Erie. They came mainly from the mezzogiorno, specifically the southern regions of Abruzzo, Campania, Calabria, and Sicily, fleeing poverty for the promise of economic opportunity and abbondonza, or abundance. During this time, most immigrants had to be sponsored by someone, a friend or relative, in order to enter the country. Ezio Cherubini, a Columbus businessman, steamship agent, and fellow countryman, would meet the Cunard Steamship in New York, having arrived from Naples, and vouch to the authorities for the employment of these men. They would then travel with Cherubini by railway to Columbus, where northern Italian Sylvio Casparis would put them to work at his limestone quarry on the Scioto River. Of the hundreds of Italians Casparis employed, many of the workers with families settled on a patch of land nearby that became the village of San Margherita. Here they could grow their own produce and raise livestock, a glimpse of the old-world lifestyle. Columbus’s burgeoning industry provided other types of work for these new transplants, such as steel production, coal mining, beer brewing, and infrastructure labor. Italians also settled in large concentrations on St. Clair Avenue, in the surrounding neighborhoods of Marble Cliff and Grandview Heights, which were predominantly Anglo American, and alongside African American residents in Flytown.

Columbus’s Flytown neighborhood was an entry point community where large numbers of people, mainly European immigrants and Southern black migrants, came to obtain inexpensive housing and steady work. As the neighborhood developed in those first few decades of the 20th century, some Italians set up grocery stores that imported goods from their native regions, operated taverns and saloons that provided workers and fellow paesani a third place to socialize, and opened restaurants and bakeries that served their regional cuisine. One of the early Italian restaurants in operation and, coincidentally, the first place to sell pizza in Columbus was the TAT Restaurant.

Pete and Philomena Corrova opened the doors of the TAT Restaurant in 1929 on Goodale Street in Flytown. They borrowed the name from the airline Transcontinental Air Transport (T-A-T) that departed from the newly opened airport nearby. Pete was Sicilian, Philomena was Neapolitan, and they served food that reflected those roots. Jim Ellison, resident pizza historian and author of Columbus Pizza, writes in his book that the TAT first served pizza as early as 1934. The late Jimmy Corrova, the son of the original owners, remembered the dough being an inch thick, baked in a cornmeal dusted Bluebird Pie Pan, ladled with heavily seasoned tomato sauce, topped with slices of American cheese, when available, and sometimes anchovies, and then cut into squares. Though most Italians would have eaten some version of pizza at home, Columbus diners had their first taste of this exotic food. Like many Italian businesses of that era, the Corrovas dealt with other Italian-owned businesses and suppliers. The TAT bought their products from the Militello Macaroni Company, a local wholesaler that imported Italian foods and sold a large variety of pasta. During this period, Corrova dealt with Militello’s wine salesman Romeo Sirij who serviced many of the Italian restaurant accounts. Sirij became close friends with the Corrovas and spent a lot of time at the TAT, until 1948 when he decided to leave sales and open Columbus’s first pizzeria.

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Romeo Sirij was born on March 3, 1912 in Newark, New Jersey to Pasquale and Giuseppina Sirij, Neapolitan immigrants. The Sirij family lived alongside other Italian immigrants in Newark’s First Ward, better known as New Jersey’s Little Italy. His father was a saloon keeper and pizza maker, and his mother was a housekeeper. Sirij grew up in a neighborhood bustling with excitement. Pushcart peddlers filled the streets, selling produce, meats, and pizzas, while restaurants, bakeries, pastry shops, and saloons filled every block. It was a densely populated community where Italians socialized, conducted business, and lived with one another. This was a home away from home for those who left Italy for something more.

Given the number of eateries in this community, it’s no wonder Sirij grew up working in restaurants and developed a love for food and cooking. If it weren’t for a trip to Ohio, he might have eventually opened a pizzeria in Newark, serving up tomato pies to his fellow Italians. However, in the late 1930s, Sirij took a two-week vacation to Columbus, Ohio to visit relatives. As his daughter Laura Sirij Bova notes, he also came to look for work and make a better life for himself. There he met his future wife Marie De Angelo and immediately fell in love. Sirij stayed and lived with his uncle while he and Marie dated for four and a half years until they married in 1941. He worked in restaurants and sales to pay the bills and had a beer and wine business with others. Then sometime in the 1940s, he met Jimmy Massey.

Jimmy Massey was born Vincent James Massucci on October 2, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois to Raffaele and Emilia Massucci, Italian immigrants. The eldest of nine children, Massey grew up in the Taylor Street neighborhood, Chicago’s Little Italy. Taylor Street was a neighborhood overcrowded and lined with tenements, but it was also a beautiful collection of churches, restaurants, social clubs, bakeries, shops, and open-air markets for its Italian residents. Although his father was a laborer, Massey came from a family of bakers. His brother-in-law Pasquale DeLeo was a baker and affiliated with the now long gone DeLeo Bakery. His maternal grandfather Giuseppe DeMichele and his uncle Joseph Palermo were bakers and operated the Detroit Italian Baking Company. As a child, he spent time with them, riding in the wagons as they made deliveries. Then at twenty-one, Massey went to work full time for his uncle in Detroit, Michigan, learning every aspect of the business: carrying sacks of flour, making dough, working the large industrial ovens, and delivering bread by truck. After working at the bakery for many years, he took a trip to Columbus, Ohio to visit friends, and, like Sirij, he met his future wife Martha Cosentino. He stayed in Columbus, and they married in 1939. At this time, he changed his name from Massucci to Massey, a fairly common practice for Italians in the first half of the 20th century, given the prejudice they experienced and the difficulty Anglo Americans had pronouncing Italian names. While his wife made a living as a beautician, Massey worked various jobs. He was a salesman, a tailor’s presser, a restaurant worker, and a house painter. For a couple years in the early 1940s, he worked at the Garden Restaurant where he sometimes prepared off-menu items, specifically pizza, for the patrons—it wasn’t uncommon during his time at the bakery to make pizza with some left-over dough between batches of bread. After he left the restaurant, he painted houses full time but found little joy or satisfaction in this work. And then he met Romeo Sirij.

“He and his friend Jimmy Massey always talked about food,” the late Marie Sirij said about her husband in a 1988 article from Columbus Monthly. Their friendship was one that revolved around food: the two men loved to cook and eat. Like good Italians, they both would prepare feasts for their family and friends, each with their own respective recipes. No one went home hungry, and everyone was a guest. They also had big personalities. Massey was a spitfire with bold opinions, risky ideas, and the tendency to embellish. Sirij was welcoming, generous, and loved being around people. He always had friends and relatives over, crowding around the dining room table with food or drinks. Sirij’s lively personality, network of connections, and business experience combined with Massey’s baking abilities and willingness to experiment was the perfect combination for what was to come. So, on a cold day in December 1950, the two men partnered to open Romeo’s Pizzeria: the year Columbus discovered pizza.

Romeo’s Pizzeria was an instant hit. Located on the corner of West Fifth Avenue and North Star Road in Grandview Heights, situated between Upper Arlington High School and Grandview Heights High School, Romeo’s was the perfect hangout for teenagers and the general public alike. Opened most days from 5 p.m.–1 a.m. and until 3:30 a.m. on weekends, the place was always busy. People waited in a line that wrapped around the corner just to be seated at a red and white gingham-clothed table in the cozy, wood-paneled dining room decorated with black-and-white photos—your typical Italian red sauce restaurant. According to his daughter Laura, “when you dined at the restaurant, it was like you were eating at our home.” This was the kind of hospitality that Sirij showed all his patrons.

The first iteration of Romeo’s pizza, given their respective backgrounds, might have been a cross between Chicago thin crust pizza and Neapolitan-style pizza. In a 1951 article from the now defunct Columbus Citizen, journalist Richard Rodgers describes Jimmy Massey’s process for making pizza: he thumps the air out of the dough and forms it into a round pie shape, ladles stewed tomatoes evenly over the surface, then generously distributes a handful of grated pecorino Romano cheese, and, finally, dusts it with oregano before popping it into the deck oven. Then he would cut the pizza into rectangular pieces rather than wedges, which was a style he would have picked up in Chicago, a technique characteristic of tavern-made pizza. The two photos that accompany the article show Massey gently ladling the slightly sweet sauce onto the dough and then holding a large pizza peel in front of an oven where the thin pizzas baked. Additional toppings included other types of cheese, sausage, mushrooms, and hand-sliced pepperoni (one of the first pizzerias in the country to offer pepperoni!). In their first year, Romeo’s sold an average of 600 pizzas a week and sometimes 200 a day on busy days. Patrons could dine in or carry out pizzas in neatly folded brown paper bags, almost tent-like, since boxes were not in conventional use at that time. Although Romeo’s popularity grew, pizza was still a largely unknown food outside of Italian enclaves. Even newspapers, both locally and nationally, had to spell the word phonetically, so the public knew how to say this foreign word: “pete-suh” or “peet-za.” They were quickly crowned the “Kings of Pizza” in Columbus.

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The unique characteristics of Columbus-style pizza began to develop in the first half of the 1950s after Massey started slinging pies at Romeo’s. As pizza became a national phenomenon, shops began to pop up all over Columbus in the proceeding years that by 1955, pizzerias had their own section in the Yellow Pages with roughly fifty listings. Jim Massey knew his Chicago-influenced, thin pies were something special and was the first to expand. He brought his brother Daniel Massucci (who started going by Dan Massey) from Chicago to manage the first Massey’s Pizza on East Main Street across town in Whitehall in 1951. Massey still worked at Romeo’s, as both a baker and a co-owner (they eventually hired an additional pizza baker), though he wanted to commercialize his product. Joseph Massucci, Massey’s son, recalls how his father would take his own blend of spices to the butcher to make sausage, bake rolls for sandwiches, make his own pizza dough for both locations, and cook two different sauces: a sweet one for pizzas that appealed to Midwestern palates, and a spicy one for pasta. His wife made meatballs and various pastas to sell at his restaurant, while his son bussed tables but quickly shifted to slicing pepperoni and cheese, preparing and cutting pizza, monitoring the ovens, and taking money. For Massey, the other restaurant was a full-time family business, though he did hire close friends who traveled from Chicago to Columbus for either education or work, some of whom had never had pepperoni on pizza.

The instant success of Romeo’s Pizzeria and then Massey’s Pizza encouraged other Italians to take a chance and open up shop. In 1952, Joe Gatto, a close friend of Sirij, opened Gatto’s Pizza in Clintonville on the north side because that area was growing. Then Tommy Iacono, a close friend of Gatto, opened Tommy’s Pizza in east Columbus. As more shops popped up, such as Leonardo’s and Rubino’s, the need for a steady supplier arose. Militello Macaroni Company, Sirij’s previous employer, originally supplied Romeo’s, Massey’s, and the other pizza shops with ingredients when they first opened. However, many Columbus pizzerias eventually migrated to the DiPaolo Food Shoppe, later renamed DiPaolo Food Distributors and then RDP, owned by Richie DiPaolo, an importer of authentic Italian food products. The reason for this shift could have been the construction of the Goodale Expressway (known today as Interstate 670) that destroyed neighborhoods like Flytown and cut the downtown off from the central Columbus neighborhoods. DiPaolo’s core customers moved into northern Columbus neighborhoods. In an attempt to attract more business, DiPaolo offered a delivery service to supply essential products to the fledgling pizzerias: Italian tomatoes, pepperoni, sausage for pizza, and, various cheeses, specifically, provolone. The reason provolone usage increased at the time among pizzerias and restaurants that sold pizza was the availability: DiPaolo sold what he could readily obtain. Mozzarella is fresh and has a short shelf life, while provolone is aged or smoked, which provides a longer shelf life. Whereas mozzarella is mild in flavor, provolone is sharp, piquant, and smokey, which adds a depth of flavor. Additionally, DiPaolo would offer other services, like slicing pepperoni and grating cheese, to customers who did not have the equipment. DiPaolo wasn’t just a supplier, as Ellison writes in Columbus Pizza, but he was a “friend and confidante.” He would often load up the family car on a Friday and personally deliver products to many of the pizzerias who were gearing up for the weekend. The Friday night deliveries also made it convenient to discuss any issues with the owners while also collecting payments. Moreover, many of the pizzeria owners and suppliers alike would golf together on Sundays at the American Italian Golf Association (AIGA), which functioned like an incubator. They could discuss business and ways to operate or innovate. The Italian business owners were truly a close-knit group of friends who supported each other’s livelihoods and families.

By the end of the decade, Sirij bought out Massey’s share of the business, changed the moniker to “Columbus King of Pizza,” and opened a second location near the Ohio State University campus. Massey also opened a second location in Whitehall where people could park and eat in their car (think pizza A&W) and was in the process of opening a third location with his wife’s cousin in Lancaster. Thanks to Massey’s passion for and proselytization of thin dough and the introduction of pepperoni, Columbus pizzerias had developed a distinct style and taste all their own: thin, yeasted crust; a sweet leaning sauce; provolone cheese; generous toppings; party-cut, rectangular pieces; and for some, a cornmeal dusted crust so the dough wouldn’t stick to the deck oven surface. The pizza might have resembled something served in Chicago taverns or one of the other Midwestern cities that produced thin crust, square-cut pizzas in this post-WWII era, but Columbus residents knew this was their own thing.

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By the time Jim Grote bought Donatos in 1963, Jimmy Massey was already out of the pizza game. Just a year earlier, he had sold the business to Guido Casa, a local Italian restaurateur who began to heavily market Massey’s Pizza and even started the trend of using a Rabelaisian amount of toppings, mainly a blanket of pepperoni—over 150 pieces! The thin crust, toppings dense, party-cut pizza was the dominant style of pizza in Columbus, so much so, that when asked in a later interview why Donatos’ pizza was made and cut this way, Grote responded, “that’s the way I learned how to do it.”

Although Donatos is not a pizza pioneer and Jim Grote is not Italian, Donatos is the most commercially successful Columbus-style pizza. Most people outside of Columbus don’t know Donatos is Columbus-style pizza, and there’s a reason for that. The short answer is marketing. Because Donatos was located in Columbus, first as a single store and then as an independent chain in Central Ohio up until the early 1990s, they didn’t have to claim style or origin. This was their only market during those decades of operation, and people expected thin-crust pizza. The long answer goes back to the mid-1950s before Grote bought the pizza place, the name, and set out to make the most consistent product he could. In 1957 at age thirteen, Grote worked at Cy’s Pizza Palace, cutting pepperoni, grating provolone cheese, learning how to make pizzas, and observing general business practices. As the story goes, there were two partners who alternated nightly shifts. “One was skimpy, one was generous,” Grote explained in an issue of Restaurant Business. “On nights that the generous guy worked, there were lots of customers. They knew which night to go, of course.” He also noticed the atmosphere in Cy’s changed depending on which partner was working. The experience sounds more like a biblical parable than a story about his first taste of business, but this experience shaped his values. He worked there for three years until the owners were looking to sell. They offered him the business first, but Grote’s father, a butcher, thought pizza was a fad and wanted his son to go to college. So, Grote went to the Ohio State University for two years, but when the opportunity came to buy another pizzeria, he dropped out of college and got a loan of $1300 from his father and future father-in-law and bought Donatos Pizza (originally Donato’s Pizza with an apostrophe) from Don Potts, a seminarian and all-around good guy. Grote opened the pizzeria in a building his father-in-law owned on Thurman Avenue.

Donatos was a family business from the very beginning. His mother made the dough in her kitchen, along with sausage and meatballs, his wife made the sauce, and friends and relatives worked at the shop. The pizzeria was consistently busy from the first day they opened the doors when they offered a twenty-five-cents-off coupon. Four years later, Grote built a black brick building across the street, added a neon sign, and bought the house behind the new building where he would raise his family. Soon, the Grote living room became the pizzeria’s unofficial waiting room. When customers came to pick up their pizza and it wasn’t ready, Grote would tell them to visit with his wife and kids at the house, and someone would deliver the pie when it was ready. Some of the customers even stayed at the house to eat their pizza, which was the level of hospitality the Grotes offered.

In the late 1960s, Grote decided to expand by opening two additional stores given the success of the flagship location. However, these two shops failed miserably. Grote would receive customer complaints about the other locations: one would run out of provolone and use other less expensive cheeses, or substitute salami for pepperoni. “They didn’t have a clue how to make pizza,” Grote recounted in a 1993 article from Columbus Monthly. Within two years, the stores closed, but the Thurman location was also having problems of its own. On Friday nights, their busiest night, orders piled up, pizzas couldn’t bake fast enough, and pepperoni slicing became inconsistent, typically a labor-intensive and cumbersome task. They’d have to take the phone off the hook just to catch up with orders. This was not a recipe for growth and expansion nor success. Grote needed to establish and refine systems if he were to make his vision of consistent pizza and satisfied customers a reality.

Grote sought better equipment and automation and was determined to ensure every pizza, down to the slice, had the same amount of ingredients on it. He started with his in-house creation of the Pepp-A-Matic, a manual machine that sliced the pepperoni the same thickness. He bought a scale to weigh the dough and toppings to the 100th of a pound. Donatos became one of the first pizzerias in town to migrate to conveyor ovens, removing the bottleneck that arose with an influx of orders and ensuring a consistent bake for every pizza. Once these systems were in place, Grote opened a second location on Brice Road in 1974. When both stores were operating with the same quality and producing the exact same product, Grote knew they were ready to expand. By 1986, they had added eight more locations in the Columbus area, and, by 1990, they had begun television advertising, created their “edge to edge” marketing language, and added sixteen more locations in the central Ohio region. Another major problem that Grote managed to solve was inconsistent dough making at each store. By mixing and rolling the dough at its headquarters, the company could ensure uniformity of product. Donatos began distributing its premade sheeted rounds of low-temperature, raw dough to its stores. In 1991, Donatos launched their first franchise location in Zanesville, Ohio. Over the next several years, they continued to grow and expanded to 100 stores. And then in 1997, Pizza Hut introduced “The Edge.”

Pizza Hut’s new pizza was undeniably Columbus-style pizza inspired and a Donatos’ copycat. Many corporate food chains create “their version” of a classic dish or popular food item or style, and the execution almost always leaves much to be desired. In this instance, what was being called into question wasn’t Pizza Hut’s imitation. It was the marketing. Calling the pizza “The Edge” clearly infringed on Donatos’ “Edge to Edge” branding that they had used since 1988 and had officially filed a federal trademark application for in 1996. Donatos’ attorney sent Pizza Hut a cease-and-desist letter. When Pizza Hut ignored the request, Donatos brought a lawsuit against the company and was granted a temporary restraining order, preventing Pizza Hut from selling the product in five Midwestern markets where Donatos operated. Ultimately, they won a five-million-dollar settlement for copyright infringement. In Jane Grote Abell’s book The Missing Piece, Grote’s daughter writes that although they were reluctant to proceed with litigation, they took the settlement money and reinvested it into the company and put dough-proofing cabinets in every store.

The Pizza Hut lawsuit brought some serious exposure to Donatos Pizza with Pizza Hut launching a regional ad campaign against Donatos, stating consumers “can’t get ‘the Edge’ at Donatos.” By 1999, Donatos had grown to a $120 million business with 145 stores in five states. This level of success got the attention of McDonalds who was looking to acquire a pizza chain. After they sold, Grote Abell recalls, the Donatos leadership and managers attended a Cincinnati Reds game where the Grotes handed out “Thank You” checks for the managers’ dedication. It was a bittersweet moment. However, only four years later in 2003, after McDonalds shares had slumped, the Grotes decided to buy back the business and turn it into the values-oriented, edge-to-edge toppings, pizza behemoth it is today.

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In 1994, Columbus was named Pizza Capital of the World by Pizza Today. This accolade likely shocked many in the industry since the title that year wasn’t granted to New York or Chicago, Naples or Rome, but, at that time, Columbus had the highest number of pizzerias per capita: one shop for every 2,000 residents. That statistic didn’t even account for the Italian restaurants with pizza on the menu. As Ellison mentions in Columbus Pizza, the 80s and 90s were collectively the era of peak pizza consumption for Columbus residents with over 450 pizzerias serving pies. Columbus’s appetite for pizza was only getting bigger.

In 1980, Father Casto Marrapese of St. John the Baptist Italian Catholic Church organized the first Columbus Italian Festival to celebrate Italian heritage and Catholic faith. The festival added another pizza dynamic to the city. Vince Militello joined his relatives from the Carfagna family, both well-known in Columbus for supplying Italian food ingredients, and made pizza for what was expected to be four to five thousand people over the course of a weekend. The festival had an overwhelming turnout of more than 10,000 people. With the festival in its 43rd year, Militello and the Carfagnas continue to churn out hundreds of gallons of tomato sauce and order cases upon cases of pepperoni and provolone cheese, so they can serve thousands of pieces of pizza to hungry festivalgoers.

During the 1980s, different Columbus publications like Columbus Monthly began to hold annual pizza contests to determine “the best pizza in town.” Readers would nominate pizzerias, and a variety of judges would rate the pizzas on crust, sauce, toppings, etc.—a standard affair for any pizza-obsessed city. In 1990, the Slice of Columbus, originally called the Columbus Pizza Challenge, began as a modest event featuring ten pizzerias. Organized by the Development Board of Nationwide Children’s Hospital, this annual pizza competition allowed attendees and judges the opportunity to sample a variety of Columbus pizza and cast their vote. Currently, the event is open to independent and chain pizzerias, all vying for the honor of “Best in Columbus.” While some pizzerias bake pizzas in on-site ovens, others deliver pies already made, but everyone is there for two things: stuffing themselves with a variety of delicious pizza and supporting a good cause. The Slice of Columbus has grown to become the largest pizza event in Central Ohio.

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Although the Columbus King of Pizza would hang up his crown sometime in the 1970s after the property that housed his pizzeria was sold, Sirij’s legacy lives on. Many of the pizza shops that opened in the following decades after Romeo’s Pizzeria were started by past employees of either Romeo’s, Massey’s, or one of the other Columbus pizza pioneers. Jimmy Massey continued to bake pizzas and make sandwiches well into his eighties, whether a few days a week at the local Varsity Club restaurant or in his home for friends even as his namesake pizzeria continued to grow. Romeo Sirij passed away in 1980 and Vincent Massucci, or Jimmy Massey, in 1990, but their names live on in the distinct style of pizza made in the independent pizzerias that dot the central Ohio region and in the Italian communities they were once a part of.

Today, the number of independently owned pizzerias in Columbus is well above the national average. Massey’s Pizza, now owned by the Pallone family, boasts fifteen locations and continues to broaden its reach locally and across the United States. The Ezzo Sausage Company, the standard bearer for premium quality pepperoni, has called Columbus its home since 1978. Ezzo pepperoni, specifically the cup and char variety, tops the pizzas of most Columbus pizzerias and is sought out by restaurants all over the country. The city of Columbus even started the Columbus-Style Pizza Trail in 2023 to celebrate its pizza. The scant list of participating pizzerias includes some originals like Massey’s, Donatos, Gatto’s, and the TAT Ristorante di Famiglia (née TAT Restaurant) whose once thick-crusted, American cheese covered pizza has converted to the thin crust, provolone and dense toppings variety. Like any regional rivalry, the critics will argue authenticity, and the outsiders will argue existentially, but perhaps it’s time that Columbus-style pizza receive the same recognition as other distinct regional styles of pizza.

Matthew Meduri is a writer and educator living in the Midwest and the author of the novel Collegiate Gothic forthcoming from Bordighera Press. His writing has appeared in Catamaran, Gastronomica, Permafrost, Story, and two anthologies and was twice listed as distinguished in Best American Food Writing. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) consortium and is the recipient of a 2022 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.