The OCB
5581 S. 9th StreetI know it’s not Friday but I was hungry and there’s a new pizza place I really wanted to try.
I texted J as I was about to leave work last Thursday to see if she had any dinner plans. She said no so I asked if it would be ok if I brought home pizza on a Thursday night.
I get a little excited when new pizza places open in Kalamazoo. There really isn’t a place that I love and that we order from every week. We have places that we like but there just isn’t anything like our favorite Chicago pizza place.
This new place that opened is The OCB on 9th Street and Cracker Barrel Drive in Texas Township. The restaurant location is already known to most people in the area. It’s the old Cracker Barrel Restaurant right off the I-94 interchange. The address is 9th Street but you have to turn on to Cracker Barrel Drive and go past the two hotels to get to it. Obviously, there has been a lot that has happened at this site. After that night in 2016, Cracker Barrel tried to forge on but a salmonella issue shut them down for good in 2018. The site has sat pretty vacant since then briefly becoming a storage facility until The OCB opened up a couple of months ago.
Officially, The OCB does not stand for The Old Cracker Barrel. Officially, it stands for Otis and Chuck’s Billiards. The business is a pool hall type of place that serves pizza.
I put my order in online right as I was leaving work in downtown Kalamazoo. I ordered the Otis Meat Lover for myself and a cheese and half pepperoni for the rest of the family. I wanted leftovers because I was working an early morning shift the next morning and wanted pizza for breakfast. The cost for the two pizzas was right around $40.
I don’t know why, but I was kind of expecting The OCB to be a bar. I thought if my pizzas weren’t ready yet, I’d just sit and have a beer. That wasn’t the case though. The OCB is not a bar and they don’t have any alcohol.
The way the restaurant is set up, is that you order right as you walk in the door. The old hostess stand is now the order stand. There was a guy standing there when I walked in and he asked if I had the carry-out. I said yes, so he headed to the kitchen to grab the boxes.
The restaurant is intended to be a gaming hall. There is no table services and everything comes out in carry-out boxes. They do this to cut down on the amount of staff they need. There is still a pretty large seating area for dining in. It’s mostly in the form of long pub type tables past the space where the three pool tables are.
In addition to the pool tables, there are cabinet video games that are free to play the first hour as long as you order a pizza. There are also dart boards and foosball tables.
J and I aren’t really big fans of Cracker Barrel so we only ate at that restaurant one time way back in 2013. I don’t really remember it but I know it looked nothing like the space looks like today. A lot has happened to this site in the last 10 years and it’s really nice to see it finally being repurposed into something unique to the area.
I was really excited when I got the pizzas home and opened up the box. They’re cracker thin and cut in to squares. I knew J and the kids were going to be excited about these.
The Otis Meat Lovers Pizza is topped with ham, pepperoni, sausage, and ground beef. The pizza pizza had sorts of crispy bits around the edges and from where some of the meats stood up.
This is the type of pizza we really like and the type of pizza we usually get in Chicago. The edges were by far the best pieces being crispy all the way through. It got a little soft in the middle but it was still really tasty and got quite a bit of saltiness from the meat was covering each slice. I was so hungry and this was so good I ended up eating the whole thing before I went to bed Thursday night.
The other pizza was a standard one topping with pepperoni on just half of the pizza.
The pepperoni they use is not slices but instead little chunks of pepperoni. Everyone grabbed the edge pizzas because those were the ones that were cooked like we like it. They left me a good chunk of the middle of the pizza for the next morning. I didn’t have the Meat Loves pizza for breakfast like I had planned on but I still had some of this pizza left which was still quite delicious.
This pizza just skyrocketed to the top of our list for pizza joint in Kalamazoo. No one else makes a pizza even close to this. It’s about as close to Chicago tavern pizza as we’ve found in Southwest Michigan.
The OCB is a unique concept in the area and they have a pretty unique pizza as well. I’m not sure we’d ever dine-in with them just because the focus seems to be more on the gaming side of things (although B would like the cabinets). They do delivery through DoorDash but it’s close enough to us that it’s a quick run to go pick it up. I see much more of The OCB’s pizza in our future.
SW Michigan Dining 