Eating pizza in a covered bridge in Ohio's Ashtabula County

Eating dinner in a covered bridge? I couldn't think of a better way to end a day of touring and photographing Ashtabula County's covered bridges than having pizza in the Covered Bridge Pizza Parlor, which is inside half of a restored covered bridge in North Kingsville, Ohio!

This cute little eatery is part of a three-restaurant chain in this northeast Ohio county where owners established two of the three pizza parlors in two halves of a restored covered bridge.

The Forman Road Covered Bridge, a Town lattice bridge built in 1862, spanned Mill Creek in nearby Eagleville until county officials wanting to remove it put it up for auction to the highest bidder in 1972.

Owners of the Covered Bridge Pizza Parlor successfully bid $5 for the old bridge, the oldest known existing bridge in Ohio at that time according to the history printed on the restaurant's menu.

The new bridge owners carefully dismantled the 126-foot-long, 55-ton span. Workers numbered each piece of lumber and took photographs before removing them from the bridge as a guide for its eventual reconstruction.

The pieces lay in storage for several years, waiting for finalized plans to reconstruct it as two pizza parlors and permit approvals to reassemble the bridge in two separate Ashtabula County locations.

In 1975, owners of the Covered Bridge Pizza Parlor moved from their original restaurant in a white frame house in North Kingsville, replacing it with a new restaurant containing half of the reassembled bridge.

In 1977, they opened a second Covered Bridge Pizza Parlor in a building utilizing the other half of their reassembled bridge in nearby Andover.

The North Kingsville and Andover restaurants use the vintage bridge as their main dining areas, while more modern additions house the kitchens. The original lattice construction is a major feature in the dining areas, as you can see from these photos I shot in North Kingsville.

The third Covered Bridge Pizza Parlor is in an Ashtabula storefront.

The menu includes sandwiches and spaghetti, but we opted for the house specialty-pizza.

We don't see good, crispy thin crust pizza around home a lot. We wanted something a little different from our usual order of a thick-crust pizza, so we tried the garlic (or "white") pizza on a thin crust. The no-sauce pizza featured garlic and several cheeses, and we took our server's suggestion to add white meat chicken as a topping and order the pie with Ranch dressing spread on the homemade crust before the cook added the garlic, cheese, and chunks of chicken meat.

We loved the pizza with its crispy, thin crust, and we really loved the price (we dropped less than $20 for dinner for two here).

The novelty of eating in a covered bridge makes visiting here fun for bridge enthusiasts and families. The dining room configuration of a long, narrow space lined with booths with a long bank of two-topper tables means it easily accommodates large and small groups.

Lack of a liquor license means you cannot order a beer with your meal, but the ambience, good food, friendly service, and great price more than make up for that.

NOTES: I found several different lengths listed for the original Forman Covered Bridge, so I went with the length listed on the Covered Bridge Pizza Parlor menu and web site as they were the folks who disassembled and reassembled the bridge.

The bridge name is variously listed as "Forman" and Foreman", depending on the source you consult. I opted for "Forman" as that is the spelling I found on current area maps (including the map of the covered bridge tour I ordered from the Covered Bridge Festival site).

 

Check out my Covered Bridges of Ashtabula County series:

Covered Bridges of Ashtabula County, Part One-an introduction to the county's bridges and the story of the nation's longest covered bridge

Covered Bridges of Ashtabula County, Part Two-the first four stops along the county's suggested driving tour of its covered bridges

Covered Bridges of Ashtabula County, Part Three-pictures and stories about four more stops along the county's suggested driving tour of its covered bridges

I also reviewed this restaurant on Yelp.

Want to learn more about some of Ashtabula's long-gone covered bridges? Check out Ohio's Covered Bridges (Postcard History) by Elma Lee Moore. This book contains postcard images of more than 200 historic bridges in the state, and includes an image of the Forman Road Bridge in its original location across Mill Creek.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Ashtabula

Comments

[gypsyscarlett]

That restaurant looks so charming.

I'm also hungry now for a pizza, darn it. ;)

[Dominique King]

Gypsy-This really was a cute little place, and who could resist the charm of eating in a covered bridge? I thought they did a good job of reusing something that would otherwise probably be simply destroyed, given the time it was done (before the renewed interest for covered bridges under former County Engineer Smolen).