My father turned 75 on February 10 and we made a three-day weekend of it, one for the ages: an intimate birthday dinner party with family and a few of my parents’ couple friends; a dudes-only overnight to Cleveland for dive bars, dinner and gambling; a Super Bowl family pizza party at Mom and Dad’s to cap it off. Leading up to Sunday’s pickup of the instantly-etched-in-lore pizza – the most dramatically orchestrated and hotly contested piece of the birthday planning – the weekend had progressed flawlessly,
Travis flew in from Boise for the weekend, and early on in the birthday planning he, Joelle and I pivoted to our shared sibling memories, and the result was a full-on nostalgia fest of feasting: Parasson’s pasta trays, garlic bread and salad dressing to start the weekend, Rocco’s sheet pizzas on Super Bowl Sunday to end it. And because we did not already have enough food in sheet form, Mom turned back the clock, too and made a Texas Sheet Cake, a Dryden popular favorite also known as the Twenty-Four Hour Ca
If you were raised in Cuyahoga Falls, chances are you’ve had a few (or a few hundred) slices of Rocco’s pizza . After opening their first shop in 1953 on West Thorton Street in Akron, the family-owned Rocco’s expanded to Cuyahoga Falls in 1962 with the Portage Trail location, within walking distance of our childhood home on 14th Street. You can order a regular round pizza like anywhere else, but to truly experience Rocco’s, to soak up all of its gooey, greasy goodness, you need to go for the 18” x 24” sheet