Click here to subscribe today or Login.
Thanks to the dusting off of an old pizza recipe, locals can now bite into a pie that hadn’t been baked for almost 22 years.
The Octagon Family Restaurant on Main Street, once the Octagon Bar & Restaurant, is serving up the local favorite once more. And members of the same local family that started it all are back tending the ovens.
“I had a customer come in because he heard it was the original. He picked it up and said, ‘Well, it looks like the Octagon,’” said owner Patty Singer, granddaughter of Steve and Helen Turdnak, who ran the eatery in the 1940s in the Dan Flood Towers building before their daughter (Singer’s mother) relocated it.
The customer was referring to the perfectly shaped and groomed round pie. The cheese doesn’t ooze off, the sauce is evenly proportioned, and no bubbles are formed on the top.
“People have been asking, ‘You have your grandma’s recipe, right?’ ” Singer said. “So far, we’ve passed the test.”
She’s more than glad to make her family’s old customers happy again by baking the pie known for its thin crust, light cheese and well-seasoned sauce.
“I haven’t seen some of these people in 22 years,” she said.
In 1972, Singer’s mother, Lucille Schuetz, and her husband, Wendel, returned to the area from New Jersey to take over the restaurant.
“My mother said, ‘It’s time for you to get your feet wet,” Schuetz said.
She did, literally. Tropical Storm Agnes of 1972 destroyed the business, and Schuetz was forced to find a new location.
By January 1973, she was back in business down the road at 375 W. Main St.
“We always had good business,” she said. “It was always a family affair.”
It still is.
Singer, who began working for her mother at age 14, has enlisted the help of her three children and husband.
John W., 25, and Patrick, 19, help mom in the kitchen; daughter Tricia, 23, tends bar; husband John does whatever is needed; and 75-year-old Lucille helps out, too.
“I’m thrilled to have my kids with me,” Singer said.
She’s equally thrilled to be in the same location where her mother did business from 1973 until 1987.
“If I could have done it 22 years ago (run the business), I would have, but the kids were small,” she explained.
After searching for locations over the past few years, the old spot – since 1987 known as The Octagon Bar but not pumping out the famed pizza — became available, and Singer jumped at the opportunity to return “home,” because she also lived with her parents in an upstairs three-bedroom apartment before Schuetz sold the business in ’87.
Besides having the original pizza recipe, which the Turdnaks purchased for $1,000 in 1943, Singer also offers a variety of other food, including more than 12 kinds of sandwiches, nine hoagies, appetizers, wings, salads and stromboli as well as the ethnic favorite pagach, with potatoes, cheese and onions or cabbage, cheese, bacon and onions.
“Everything is made to order,” Singer said.
Customers can request items exactly as they want them, and they’ll be sure to get them just that way, she said.
The grand reopening celebration, which took place last month, kept the family busy in the kitchen.
“We had to go upstairs to get more chairs,” she explained. “The whole place was filled.”
Singer, who works for the Wilkes-Barre Area School District during the day (she makes the pizza dough fresh every day on her lunch), is optimistic for the future, too, and hopes she can be as successful as her parents and grandparents were years ago.
“For me, it’s just a passion,” she said. “It’s in the genes.”
IF YOU GO
What: Octagon Family Restaurant
Where: 375 W. Main St., Plymouth
Hours: 4-10 p.m. Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and 4-11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays
Call: 779-2288