SYLVANIA, Ohio — In 2016 – after 39 years of feeding hungry college kids, townies and visitors – Myles’ Pizza Pub on Wooster Street in Bowling Green closed its doors.
But that wasn’t the end of the line for the famously loaded with toppings pizza.
After Chip Myles closed the doors to the iconic parlor, a former long-time employee took up the pizza cutter once again to bring the (slightly modified) recipe back to a new generation – not in Bowling Green but a little farther north.
Abraham Valle is the owner of Half Time Pizza on W. Bancroft St. west of Toledo in Sylvania.
Valle started making pizza when he worked for Myles Pizza in the early 90s.
He never really looked back.
“It was a great job. Chip Myles was a great owner. He really showed me how the restaurant business worked. Because of that, I liked doing it for the 20 something years I did it,” said Valle.
When word got out that Chip Myles was closing the doors to the Bowling Green restaurant in 2016 people came from all over to get one last taste of their favorite college town pizza.
It was something that took Myles by surprise at the time.
"In one sense I was overwhelmed and the other sense I thought, 'Wow, I didn't realize people felt this way about Myles' Pizza!' I had no idea," said Myles in 2016. "You know, you have your people who always tell you how much they like it, but I had no idea the volume was what it was."
Valle understood what made so many people fall in love with the pizza however.
In fact, he loved it so much that he opened Halftime Pizza a few years later.
And it truly is a labor of love.
Valle is passionate about his pizza, and although it isn’t the precise recipe as his former employer’s, Valle does employ a lot of the same techniques he learned at Myles’.
First and foremost, he doesn’t skimp on the ingredients – toppings, sauce, or cheese.
“It's my own sauce, I'm very proud of it, and it is along the lines of what we used over there, but it's my own recipe. Sausage, dough, everything I make from scratch by hand every morning," said Valle. "I just feel that learning from Chip, the importance of doing things by hand, put your own stamp on it for the customers, it pays off in the end.”
Although they’ve been open for a few years, and it doesn’t have quite the same vibe as Myles’ old school college hangout charm, Valle is still happy with his decision to continue the tradition.
“The neighborhood's been great to me so far. It's not quite the college town we were used to in Bowling Green I'll admit, but I'm also a little older so maybe that's not such a bad thing.”
Half Time Pizza is at 7702 W. Bancroft on the corner of Heysler Rd. and next door to Ventura’s Mexican Restaurant.
Check out the above video to see how Valle puts his pizza together.
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