New Pizza Places in Columbus: Pepperoni Stays, Cuts Change

"We talk to people on the East Coast and that immediately causes them just to be enraged," Jim Ellison told WOSU in April, describing what happens when outsiders meet a Columbus pizza cut into squares. Ellison wrote Columbus Pizza: A Slice of History, and he calls the tavern cut "sometimes the most controversial part of Columbus style pizza."

Columbus Monthly put this late summer plainly on September 24: "There are plenty of new pizza shops these days." Put those shops side by side and they share a pattern. Each one borrows something from the local tradition, and the borrowed piece is almost always the pepperoni. The square cut is the piece almost all of them leave out.

The Bundle Ellison Describes

Ellison doesn't define Columbus-style by one feature. He calls it a "combination of things." From his WOSU interview, the parts are:

• Crust: thin, close kin to Chicago tavern pizza, made from yeast-risen dough given time to rise
• Oven: a deck oven, not a conveyor
• Toppings: edge to edge, with a nominal crust ring or none at all
• Sauce: a little sweeter than many East Coast sauces
• Cheese: provolone, or a provolone-mozzarella mix
• Cut: tavern or party cut, in squares or rectangles
• Pepperoni: a lot of it. Ellison says Columbus "was really the first place where pepperoni was a dominant topping"

Experience Columbus gives a shorter version for its Columbus-style pizza trail: thin crust, toppings to the edge, square cuts. It also says recipes and flavors vary from shop to shop. That gives a baseline to measure against. The trail traces the style back to 1934, the year of a surviving TAT menu that lists pizza, and it names Donatos, Gatto's, Josie's Hilltop and TAT among its 18 participating pizzerias. Donatos, which the Grote family opened in the early 1960s, still describes its signature pie as thin crust with 100 pieces of pepperoni and aged smoked provolone.

Uncle Frico's Gets Closest, Then Cuts Wedges

Among the summer's openings, the shop nearest the local template is Uncle Frico's at 200 W. Lane Ave., in the Rambler complex near Ohio State. Joey and Jamie Sexton of Sexton's Pizza opened it August 26. NBC4 reported a soft opening for pickup and delivery in late July, with a grand opening still to come.

The pie is a bar pie. Joey Sexton describes it to NBC4 as very thin, pan-baked and nearly crustless. The dough is handmade and rises for two days. That covers three items from Ellison's list: thin crust, risen dough, almost no crust ring. The shop is named for the frico, the crisped cheese that rings each pie.

The cut is where it parts ways. Columbus Navigator says the 16-inch bar pies come cut into New York-style wedges, "Columbus-thin but with an East Coast chew." The shop exists because of an earlier crunch. When Barstool's Dave Portnoy gave Sexton's an 8.1 in his One Bite review series, crowds followed, and Sexton's dropped bar pies from the menu because it ran out of oven space. "I have been sitting on this idea since we had to take these off the menu after the Barstool rating," Joey Sexton told NBC4. The current online ordering page lists hours as Wednesday and Thursday 2:30 to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., and closed Monday and Tuesday.

Black Pony Keeps the Edge and the Pepperoni, in a Pan

A mile or so down High Street, Black Pony Pizza at 1001 N. High St. moves farther from the template and still keeps two of its parts. Ryan Murphy and his longtime friend Ken Shick opened it September 17. Murphy has a Detroit-style slice tattooed on his neck, and Navigator reports that customers nearly ate through the supply on opening weekend.

Detroit-style is the rectangular pan pie with a thick crust, the description WOSU's host used when setting it next to the Columbus version. That rules out thin crust, but Black Pony's lead pie still answers Ellison's pepperoni point. I'll Have Another, one of five house pies named for Kentucky Derby winners, comes with red sauce, a house cheese blend, Ezzo cup-and-char pepperoni, herbed ricotta, balsamic, basil and parmesan. The online menu lists it at $18 small and $23 large.

As of NBC4's September 26 report, Black Pony was still carryout only and sold whole pies rather than slices. Hours were Thursday 4 to 9 p.m., Friday 4 to 10 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. The menu also goes well past pepperoni. Dark Star uses white sauce and a mushroom blend, Always Dreaming has Thai chicken, Venetian Way combines bacon, potato and pesto, and Street Sense is built on carnitas.

Honey Boy and Mikey's Sell the Slice

Two other openings move farthest from the square: they sell pizza by the slice, a format a party cut can't really offer.

Honey Boy Pizzeria opened September 16 inside Eupouria, the self-serve beer bar at the South Campus Gateway, 1568 N. High St. Brothers Remy, Jordan and Jarod Adkins opened it in tribute to their father. The pies are 18-inch New York-style, sold whole or by the slice, according to the Dispatch. The namesake pie sticks with local habit on one point. It layers red sauce, pepperoni, whipped garlic ricotta and hot honey. Sides include garlic knots and zeppole with a sweet ricotta dip.

Mikey's Late Night Slice is a Columbus company exporting a style that isn't Columbus-style. Navigator calls it the city's "homegrown late-night pizza chain." Its eleventh location opened July 31 at 1312 Grandview Ave. in Grandview Heights, with a full bar, a Saucy Bar, a slushie bar and a patio. It stays open until 2:30 a.m. most nights and until 3 a.m. Friday and Saturday. NBC4 describes the Grandview shop as New York-style, serving slices or whole pies. A month later, on August 28, Mikey's opened again at Polaris, in the Galaxy complex at 2136 Ikea Way. It started on limited hours, with the late schedule planned once the shop settles in.

Count the four newcomers so far and pepperoni is the one trait all of them carry. It's under Uncle Frico's frico edge, cupped and charred on Black Pony's lead pie, and under hot honey at Honey Boy. The thing none of them do is cut a pie into squares.

Holt Road Keeps the Squares

The one summer opening that still serves the square cut is also the oldest name in this group. The Original Josie's Pizza held a grand opening for its second location on July 10 at 1675 Holt Rd., in the former Santino's space near Hollywood Casino. Navigator calls it a West Side institution that has been cutting Columbus-style pies since 1959, now under fourth-generation family ownership, "same square-cut pizza."

The online menu lines up with two more items on Ellison's list. The cheese is a 50/50 mozzarella-provolone blend, which is the provolone mix Ellison names. Traditional pepperoni goes under the cheese unless you ask otherwise, and a separate old-world pepperoni pizza puts it on top. The rest of the lineup reads like a neighborhood pizzeria's: meat-lovers with pepperoni, sausage, hamburger, ham and bacon, a combo with pepperoni, sausage, mushroom, onion and green pepper, and a garlic-bread pizza.

The name has a longer story. Josie's Hilltop, a separate business on the Experience Columbus trail, says Placid "Kelly" Catalfina and his wife, Josephine, opened the first Josie's Pizza in 1959 at 952 West Broad, in the Bottoms area of downtown, next to a bar they named Kelly's. The Josie's Hilltop history also says pepperoni has always gone under the cheese, the same order The Original Josie's menu uses on Holt Road.

This summer's openings show how the local style is changing. Newcomers carry the pepperoni from Lane Avenue to Grandview to Polaris. The square cut is still coming from family businesses that have been making it since the 1950s, and in July one of them added a storefront on the West Side.

Pizza arguments say a lot about how a place sees itself, and the same goes for houses that don't fit a template. If you live in Franklin County and own a home that needs its story told carefully before it's priced, Brandon Emmanuel would be glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.