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The Conneaut Cult of Stromboli
The Italian American delight was perfected in Ohio
Bob Dylan once sang “I’ll look for you in old Honolul-a, San Francisco, Ashtabula.” If he happened to be singing about stromboli (he wasn’t), he’d probably have the most luck on that last stop. A few pizza shops in Ashtabula, Ohio, serve stromboli, but if he wanted his pick from a slew of truly great ones, he’d be wise to search one town over, in Conneaut — America’s secret stromboli paradise.
Nearly all the competing pizza places in Conneaut — a town of about 13,000 with a half dozen-plus solid mom and pop pizza joints — have stromboli on the menu. Rainbow Cafe, Pat’s Fireside Pizza, JD’s Pizza, Covered Bridge Pizza Parlor: Any of these would be a worthy first stop on a stromboli crawl. Restaurant signs all over town boast that they serve what’s essentially a pizza tucked into itself. The question of which one is the best can spark debates about dough-to-cheese ratio and off-putting wait times.
People’s loyalties are fierce, but they can shift: Sometimes they have to. Pizzi Cafe, for example, was a dependable favorite back when I was on staff at Sheldon Calvary Camp in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and spent my whole summer in that town on Lake Erie’s shore. Pizzi’s had its own version of stromboli — the Torpedo, affectionately known as a “torp.” The place had the checkered tablecloths that mark a truly old school Italian spot. It had a long wooden bar that served heavy glass fishbowls of beer the size of your head. The torps were a marvel: The sheer volume of cheese and pizza toppings contained in the shell of crust seemed like a magic trick.
To the dismay of many, Pizzi Cafe closed about a year ago. Conneaut has its share of other stromboli spots to fill the void, though voids can’t always be filled. Bruce “Voodoo” Schoyer, a Calvary Camp staff member from the late 1970s to early ’80s, has kept a pepperoni torp in his freezer since 1981.
In Conneaut, a stromboli is a stromboli — not for what it has but what it lacks. It’s a cousin of your standard calzone, but there’s no ricotta burrowed inside, only mozzarella or maybe some parm. Traditionalists elsewhere will insist certain meats make a stromboli, but in Conneaut, that’s not the case. A pepperoni or meatball stromboli hits the…
