Zae & Zeb’s Pizza
120 E. Main StreetOn the road again on a Friday night.
My overtime shift brought me to a very familiar area of St. Joseph County. As I’ve written about many times, my in-laws live on a lake between Centreville and Sturgis so I’m in that area occasionally when we go to their place.
I had to make two stops on Friday night. One was in Centreville and the other wasn’t too far away in Three Rivers.
I had gotten called up to the Grand Rapids office on Friday to pick up a project for a colleague who was on vacation. It was fairly simple just a little time consuming. I got it done by about 2:00 then headed back to the Kalamazoo office to wrap some things up.
Around 4:30, I decided to start heading towards Centreville. I needed to stop for gas and of course, I had a plan for dinner.
I stopped in Schoolcraft at the Speedway on my way down US-131. When I got there, I called a pizza place in I have been wanting to get to for quite some time in Centreville to get an order started.
Zae & Zebs is on Main Street just off of downtown Centreville at the intersection with Nottawa Street. This little building has been a pizza place as long as my in-laws have lived in the area. It was Li’l Louie’s for a while which I got pizza from once. Then it was Pizza Depot which I never got to. In October of 2024, new owners took over that restaurant and changed the name to Zae & Zebs. Before all of that, this building was an old Standard Oil gas station. You can still tell by looking at the building where the pumps used to be and the garage door for the service bay was.
The building has undergone a pretty big transformation since the Li’l Louie’s days. I’m pretty sure this was all done before Pizza Depot opened but I don’t have the pictures to prove it. Gone are the blue and gold colors of the Centreville High School Bulldogs off both the outside of the building and the inside where that was the theme. The order counter is still off to the right when you walk in. It’s a large opening in the wall to the kitchen that is fronted with metal corrugated siding. There is a menu board that hangs above this opening but you really have to strain your next to look up.
The dining room has also undergone a drastic redesign. Gone are the jersey’s and pictures from Bulldogs history and it’s been replaced with a much more tame, modern feeling dining room. The same metal siding from the counter continues on all the walls and the floor has been redone with a wood laminate. I kind of get the feeling they’re going for a somewhat industrial look because this did used to be a service station. It’s just such a difference without the letterman’s jackets and school uniforms that used to adorn the walls in this space. It’s a much cleaner look that doesn’t scream “glory days.”
I had put in an order for a medium sausage and pepperoni pizza plus a half order of breadsticks. There is no online ordering so I actually had to call and talk to a person. The total cost for my meal was right around $25 which I paid for on my card then headed to the job site to eat while I still had some time.
I opened up the box of breadsticks first. The half order was two very large breadsticks covered in a garlic butter, Parmesan cheese and Italian seasoning. They didn’t really look or taste homemade..they were a little too perfect but if you slap enough garlic butter on anything, they’re going to be tasty. There was a cup of marinara sauce for dipping and I did indeed use it. It was a really tasty sauce with a little bit of sweetness to it.
I’ve seen a lot of people comment that Zae & Zeb’s pizza is much closer to Li’l Louie’s than Pizza Depot was. Just like Li’l Louie’s, it’s has a really thick doughy crust that doesn’t hold up well to the toppings when it’s fresh out of the oven. Everything kind of sank towards the middle where the crust was the thinnest.
It may sound from that description that I wasn’t going to say I liked it but this pizza was actually really tasty albiet a little bit hard to eat in the car…even though I was just sitting in a parking lot. There was a really thick layer or a kind of sweet sauce and a thick layer of cheese. On top of that were pepperoni’s with just a little char around the edges and some thick pieces of Italian sausage. I’m going to be honest and say I really liked this pizza cold the next day. I was having a hard time eating it without making a huge mess fresh out of the oven but the next morning, I devoured this thing for breakfast. It was super hearty and had a ton of great flavor. Had I been sitting at home or at the restaurant, my experience may have been different but it was a little difficult to eat without a table in front of me.
The flavor of this pizza from Zae & Zeb’s was great. Like Li’l Louie’s, it’s such a classic small town pizzeria type of pizza. My family tends to lean towards thin crust pizzas though which is why we’ve never ordered it at the lake. I’ve been curious about the place since they opened it and it’s finally a place I can cross of my list. It’s weird that it took me getting sent down to Centreville for work to finally get it but I did and I enjoyed it.
