Marion’s Piazza (Mason)
6176 Snider RoadDid you know Dayton pizza was a thing? I didn’t but I found it was and boy, am I glad I did.
We spent all day last Friday at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Gardens. We started our day with breakfast at Waffle House but we didn’t really eat anything at the zoo. When we got to the car, J asked if I had another restaurant in mind.
I had several but I knew I would be taking a chance with the kids at a sit down place after a long, hot day walking around the zoo.
Not to worry. I had also scoped out pizza places near our hotel and that’s how I discovered Dayton style pizza.
Marion’s Piazza is the originator of what they call Dayton Style Pizza. There are nine locations around the greater Dayton area with one somewhere between Cincinnati and Dayton is Mason, OH not too far from where our hotel was.
Marion’s Piazza in Mason is on Snider Road just off Tylersville Road a couple of miles from the I-75 interchange. The restaurant is visible from Tylersville Road but you have to enter kind of on the backside from Snider Road. The large building and large parking lot are part of a larger retail complex among several others in the area.
I put in my order for a 13″ pepperoni pizza and a 13″ plain cheese pizza as we were sitting in the parking lot at the zoo. The guy taking my order said it’d be about 15 minutes. That would have been great but when I put the address in my GPS, it said it’d take us almost 40 minutes due to construction.
Google Maps was pretty accurate and we got there about 40 minutes later. There is a side door and a front door. The side door didn’t say it was a carry-out access so I went to the front. Turns out, they both lead in to a massive dining room. The theme of the room is a restaurant on a Venice canal. There are murals on the wall and trees and street lamps mingled in with the tables on the aqua patterned carpet. I was really shocked by how big the place was and at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon, it felt even bigger with no one in for their Friday night pizzas yet.
There is an order counter past the dining room so that’s where I headed. The guy at the cash register handed me a menu and thought I was going to place an order but I told him I had called one in. He looked it up and found two pizza boxes sitting on top of the oven. The cost for the two pizzas was just a little over $27.
The Dayton style pizza is exactly the kind of pizza we like. Thin crust with ingredients all the way to the edge. The pizza is cut in to small rectangles to make it easier to handle with crust on the edge to hold on to. The crust is very thin and crispy all the way through to the middle. It’s then topped with a delicious thick sauce and a thick layer of cheese.
The pepperoni pizza was identical to the plain cheese with the addition of a lot of pepperonis. A. Lot. Of. Pepperonis. They covered every square inch of the top of the pizza with sliced pepperoni so there was no way to take a bite without biting in to one.
I fell in love with Marion’s Piazza from the minute I opened the box. We always prefer thin crust pizzas and I’m so glad I searched a little harder and found this place. It was the first thing that came up in my Google searches but I can’t imagine us finding a place that would do a better pizza the way we like it. Dayton style pizza is now a thing in my vocabulary and I’m a better person for knowing what it is.
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