With names like Red Hot Rooster, Olive Oyl, Dilly Dilly and Chuck Norris, one may not know what they’re about to get a hold of let alone take a bite of.
But make no mistake, a pizza parlor in North Ridgeville is making its mark on the area and reinventing the pizza experience.
After spending several years in what owners referred to as “the wild west” of Lorain’s downtown renaissance and almost miraculously making a go of things, partners Andrew Edreff and Jenso Soto officially opened their Smash Pizza Kitchen about eight months ago at 7054 Avon Belden Road.
They don’t deliver.
You can’t call to place an order.
There’s no dine in eating, no fancy dining room, and they’re closed three days a week.
And they’re smashing it.
But to get the point of an actual brick and mortar pizza parlor complete with kitchen, order station, office space and storage is an interesting tale for a classically trained French chef in Soto to an information technology import exporter in Edreff.
It all began about eight years ago when Broadway in downtown Lorain started to make its comeback, and Soto, along with other local entrepreneurs in the area, began offering food from pop-up tents at local watering holes, like Bascule Brewery and Speak of the Devil.
Then, when Speak of the Devil opened its establishment, Soto was asked if he could do a food truck and provide patrons pizza and sandwiches.
That morphed into carving out a tiny space inside Speak of the Devil to serve the hungry patrons is when Soto and Edreff crossed paths when Soto was cooking in the pop ups and food trucks.
Edress “just kept showing up where I was and asking if he could help. I said, ‘sure,’ and we’ve been friends and business partners ever since,” Soto laughed.
Then, the coronavirus pandemic hit.
“Things were going really well, but then all of a sudden, everything is shut down,” Soto explained. “And, at the time, we had no idea when anything was going to re-open, if ever.
“So, we really had no choice but to shut down. That was tough because we were really hitting our stride and things were going well for about three years.
“So, we sort of hopped around a lot, and ended up a drive-thru in North Ridgeville. It was this tiny, tiny space and we were doing paper tickets and folks would drive up and order and we started making their pizza to order right then. We could get them out in five or 10 minutes and there were lines of cars wrapping all around — blocking traffic. It was right in the middle of the COVID thing, but it was utter chaos.”
Soto and Edreff also had a satellite location inside Ghost Tree Brewing in Amherst and were preparing perfect pies at the drive-thru, the satellite parlor and continuing with the food truck.
“We were like pizza nomads,” Edreff laughed. “But, when this location in North Ridgeville came available, we jumped at the opportunity and were able to consolidate all of our little shops into this one space.”
Permanent home
After a general remodel and build out, Smash Pizza Kitchen finally had a permanent home, complete with a spacious prep kitchen and state-of-the-art pizza oven that ensures consistency in the pies no matter who may be making them.
Soto, a former Chez Francois chef, said that it’s that consistency to quality that is most important to him.
He did share, however, that the new pizza oven could probably cook more than 100 pizzas an hour if he had to.
“No matter who or when you get a pizza from us, you can expect it to be the same consistent, excellent quality,” Soto said. “We’re not worried about who has or say they have the ‘best’ pizza, because there’s so many different people with so many different tastes.
“I look at pizza like a canvas, and it’s not just red sauce and pepperoni. We’re not mass producing pizzas as fast as we possibly can; we are here to take care to make the best pizza that we can, each time, every time.
“We want to make a sexy pizza.”
And the business has become a family affair as well, with wives, parents and siblings all pitching in to make a go of the pizza parlor.
Already well known for its signature pizzas, the Dilly Dilly pickle pizza, Edreff said, is a customer favorite and named one of the best pizzas in Cleveland in a recent poll of local pizza joints.
And how does one place an order?
Pizza cravers simply need to go to www.SmashPizzaKitchen.com and order online or simply walk in.
And the name?
Simply a slang phrase Andrew and his friends used for when they were hungry for a pie. “Let’s go smash a pizza.”
For more information, call 440-731-3011 or visit https://www.smashpizzakitchen.com/.
