Jaspare’s Pizza (Lawton)
156 N. Main StreetIt’s Friday night, it’s pizza night again, and I’m working overtime. It must be fall.
My overtime shift took me down to Lawton this week. I had a pretty decent gap between my regular shift and the overtime shift so I had time to grab something to eat beforehand.
I’ve been to Lawton a few times over the years on this overtime work but I don’t usually have the time to eat. I had to look up restaurants to see if there was anything that would be quick and almost immediately, I found a familiar pizza place.
Jaspare’s Pizza in Lawton is on North Main Street at the intersection with East 2nd Street. The building is a large two story brick building that’s over a hundred years old. The pizzeria takes up the street level retail space of the building. This is one of four Jaspare’s location in Southwest Michigan. The others are in Portage, Vicksburg, and Mendon. There’s also one on Gull Road but they have their own website and online ordering system so not sure if they’re still related or if that one’s a spin-off.
It was a pretty busy night already in downtown Lawton and it took me a few minutes to find parking. There was a high school football game a little later and I think everyone was at Big T eating dinner before heading over to the high school. I had put my order in online so I found a spot on the street a block or so away then walked back to the building.
At one time this restaurant did have some dine-in service but now the customer space is just a big empty room with a green counter near the back of the now barren dining room. If it hadn’t been for the fairly new lookin POS system sitting on that counter, I would have assumed I had walked in to a vacant building.
There is no one at that counter but there is a door bell attached to the corner. I rang the doorbell and a few seconds later, someone opened the kitchen door and yelled out asking my name. I gave it to him and he came out a few seconds after that with a pizza box. He handed it to me and I was on my way.
I have always like Jaspare’s Pizza. We ordered from them semi-regularly when they had a short-lived shop on Stadium Drive in Kalamazoo and we’ve ordered from the Mendon location on more than one occassion when we are at J’s parents house near Centreville. They’re always solid pizzas.
I’ve stopped ordering large pizzas when I’m by myself because I have a habit of overeating. This night, I ordered a 14″ sausage and pepperoni. The cost was just a little bit over $20.
The pizza is a hand stretched, delicious pizza dough topped with a tangy sauce, cheese, pepperoni and Italian sausage. There was a lot of meat on this pizza which added a ton of flavor in each bite. The crust is somewhere between a thin crust and the thicker typically carry-out which I really like. There’s still some bite to it but you’re not overpowered by bread. The sauce seemed a little thin but that actually helped me eat it in the car. I didn’t make a huge mess. The sauce has so much flavor that you really don’t need a lot.
The building set up at Jaspare’s Pizza in Lawton is…weird, but I’m sure they’re just doing what they need to do to survive. The pizza was delicious..as it always is from Jaspare’s. I ate about half of it, did my shift, then took the rest home for breakfast Saturday morning. I was up early to work a different job (we’ll get to that) so having tasty left over pizza as I walked out of the house was a good pick me up for a long drive in the dark.
SW Michigan Dining 