The Friendliest Pizzeria In The Whole USA.

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​The Friendliest Pizzeria In The Whole USA.

...Continued from yesterday:
      "Oh, snap, they're closed?" I said  upon the the discovery of darkened doors at East of Chicago Pizza, my favorite of all Amish Country eateries. "Now where do we eat?"
         The question was more or less rhetorical, since if we wanted to eat in the town of Berlin, Ohio, there was only one other restaurant - in fact, there was only one other commercial establishment of any sort - opened past five pm in Berlin, and that was the Berlin Farmstead buffet, which I guess would have been fine, except that at that moment I wasn't feeling Farmstead buffet. I was feeling East of Chicago Pizza. Which nonetheless didn't appear to be in the cards on this night.  "So I guess it's the Farmstead buffet?" I sighed.
         Tom glanced at his watch. "It's five after seven." The Berlin Farmstead closed at seven pm. "There's that Burger King on the edge of town." 
         "Okay," I conceded, "Burger King it will be, even though I'm really in the mood for..." Then it hit me. "Hey," I said, "am I just wishfully thinking this, or did we pass another East of Chicago Pizza in Millersburg on our way here?"
           Tom had no recollection, but I pulled out my phone to check, and, sure enough, there was an East of Chicago in Millersburg, about five miles away. And, glory be, it was open until 9 pm!
             So I pulled up my Google maps, typed in our destination and we followed the instructions until we came to the brightly-lit Millersburg commercial strip lined with stores, markets, restaurants, gas stations and the like.
               "Five hundred feet...one hundred feet...you have arrived at your destination," Ms. Google informed us. 
​                But among the sea of neon  signage, we could make out not one that indicated the presence of an East of Chicago Pizzeria. After a couple of fruitless recalibrations we gave up on Google and pulled into a gas station. "I'm not sure this place exists," I said. "I'm calling them."
                 The number I punched in  was answered by a cheerful young woman who not only verified for me that the Millersburg East of Chicago Pizza existed, but, when I told her we couldn't find the place, she asked me where I was and informed me that she was going to tell me how to find it and would stay on the line with me until we did.
                And so our kind young guide shepherded us over the phone until she directed us to turn into the driveway of an anonymous building set back off the highway. 
                "Now you're here," she said. "See it?"
                 Ah, yes, now we did see the unlit, invisible-from-the-highway East of Chicago Pizza signs on the building.    

      We asked  the friendly teenager who greeted us as we entered if it had been her who'd helped us find out way. She said no, so we asked her to thank whoever it was.
         The restaurant was almost empty,     

...and I wondered if the burned-out sign was partly to blame. Still, the workers kept busy replacing the pizza buffet trays before they were empty.

        We noticed among the workers a little boy zipping in and out of the kitchen. One time he replenished  the plates, another time the silverware. I thought he might be the child of one of the employees whose babysitter didn't show.
           "You are such a good helper," I said to the boy when I passed him on my way to the pizza buffet. "And look how nicely you stacked those plates!"
            But the little boy was shy, and quickly zipped back into the kitchen.
       While we were eating - that is to say, relishing - our pizza, salad, and the restaurant's sublime mini-cinnamon rolls that I can eat my weight in,

...our waitress, the same teenager who'd greeted us, moseyed over to our table. "Where are you folks from?" she asked.
           When we told her we were from the Columbus area she said that really liked Columbus and that she'd been there just the weekend before to buy her prom gown. We then got to chatting about this and that, where she went to high school, what she planned to do after graduation, that the little boy - who was now sitting in the dining room on the floor - was seven years old, that the East of Chicago Pizza in Berlin had been closed for a few days because of a plumbing emergency but that it should be opened again soon.
           The man who was sitting in the booth behind us, a middle aged man wearing an Ohio State sweatshirt, stood and turned to us. "Did I hear you say you're from Columbus?"
        When we said that indeed we were he told us that he'd lived in Newark, a Columbus exurb, for thirty years but moved back to this area, where he was from, to be with family. The man, our waitress, Tom and I all agreed that Columbus was a great place.
            By the time Tom and I were ready to leave we were the last customers in the restaurant. Our waitress came out of the kitchen carrying two large pizza boxes.
            "Here," she said, proffering us the boxes "we can't let you leave without taking all this pizza with you." 
            It turned out that by "all this pizza" our waitress meant all the pizza left on the trays.                  

      "You want us to take...all this pizza?"
       "Yep."
        "Don't you or some of the other staff want to take some?"
         "Nope. You want another box?"
          I assured her that two boxes of pizza would be more than enough.
          So I got to work filling my two boxes of pizza,    

...and a carton of cinnamon rolls,

...all the while feeling like I was taking the food out of someone else's mouth.
        Still, I suppose it was true that any left over pizza would be thrown out at the end of the night. And our haul did not go to waste. The following night we didn't  have to worry about seeking out a place to eat dinner, as we feasted on our microwaved left-over East of Chicago pizza in our hotel room while we sat on the comfy couch and watched "Strays," a gross, vulgar comedy  flick that I should be embarrassed to admit how much I enjoyed.