“The Industry Awards Celebration honors the best in our industry,” said John Barker, president and CEO of the Ohio Restaurant & Hospitality Alliance. “From restaurants to breweries, caterers, food trucks, coffee shops and more, our community is wide, wonderful and growing. The Industry Awards Celebration highlights the businesses and leaders moving Ohio’s hospitality industry forward.”
Vic Cassano Sr., the son of Italian immigrants, and his mother-in-law, Caroline “Mom” Donisi, started Cassano’s Pizza King, Dayton’s first pizza shop, in a 20-by-15 foot room at West Schantz Avenue and Patterson Boulevard on June 4, 1953.
“They sold an astonishing 400 pizzas on their first day, and from that moment, Cassano’s was on its way to becoming a Dayton institution,” the press release said.
Known locally at the start as “Vic & Mom’s,” the restaurant was built with the tireless work of the family, including Cassano’s wife, Anne.
“It was my mom and grandma who stayed up late at night, rolling dough and making tomato sauce and slicing pepperoni,” the couple’s daughter Cindy Cassano McElroy told the Dayton Daily News in 2008.
Credit: Dayton Daily News Archive
Credit: Dayton Daily News Archive
Photographs in the Dayton Daily News archive captured Cassano taste-testing the square-cut pizza piled with toppings to ensure the taste and quality.
The pizza was popular with Dayton palates. Five years after the back-room start, there were 16 Cassano’s pizza shops in the area.
People couldn’t get enough of the Pizza King’s combinations of pepperoni, sausage and cheese. The company grew to 125 stores over the following three decades, and by the 1970s the company ranked in the top four pizza chains in the country.
“The fun of the free enterprise system is that you can go as far as you want if you are willing to offer a little more than the average person,” Cassano Sr. told the Dayton Daily News in March 1974.
A few years after Cassano Sr. retired in 1986, his son Vic Cassano Jr. bought the company. Today, the third generation runs the company honoring their families motto of “The Proof is in the Taste.”
The Cassano Family was inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Nick Kostis, co-founder of Pickwick & Frolic/Hilarities 4th Street Theatre in Cleveland and George Schindler and Kay Ameen, founders of Hospitality Restaurants in Cleveland.
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