Local Italian favorite, around since the ’50s, closes. A new pizzeria will replace it

In 1958, a 12-year-old Dan Harris cleaned the floors and washed dishes at his parents’ new Italian restaurant on Pacific Highway, in what is now Lakewood. On Sunday, July 9, after serving the last manicotti and meatballs to generations of familiar faces, the 77-year-old closed the doors to Pizza Casa one last time.

He sold the business to the owner of Puget Sound Pizza, Cory Cannell, who has run the downtown pizzeria since 2017 and added a second outpost in Spanaway in 2021.

Bound by a confidentiality agreement to stay mum on the deal until just last week, Harris said he worked to secure job offers for each of his employees, some of whom had been with him for decades. On July 6 around noon, he broke the news to his staff.

“Within an hour and a half, I was getting emails and phone calls,” he told The News Tribune a week later. “How it got out that fast, I have no idea! I was overwhelmed. I didn’t think there would be any kind of response like that.”

The ensuing three-and-a-half days brought “record business.” They were out of everything by 7 p.m. on Sunday.

“It was quite sweet and sour, to see all of our old customers for the last 65 years — four generations or more. It was amazing,” said Harris, adding, “Our customers were the best in the world, very loyal.”

On Monday morning, he posted to Facebook a final ciao, noting a multitude of celebrations over more than six decades and the unique perspective of watching families grow. One woman, who worked at the restaurant for a time under Harris’s mother, said every family birthday happened there; another recalled her grandparents’ memory of their first date in the early 1960s.

“We’ve seen a lot of history fly by,” said Harris.

What customers loved about Pizza Casa was just that: “‘You guys feel like an old shoe,’” Harris often heard. “Every time I got ready to remodel, I’d ask, ‘What do you think about this?’ ‘If you change a thing, we’ll quit coming in — it’s like coming into our own living room.’”

Picture wood paneling on the walls, historic photos of the building and the family, classic red-and-white checkered tablecloths, cocktail placemats, a candy counter next to the host stand, Frank Sinatra through the speakers, and light fixtures crafted by one of his brothers out of old tin cans.

The restaurant was open seven days a week until only recently — a beacon of reliability, said Harris.

His mother Kathryn Grassi opened Pizza Casa with her husband in 1958, using family recipes for pizza (“patterned after Chicago thin-crust,” said Harris), spaghetti sauce, meatballs and sausage. His mom eventually remarried; she and Nello Grassi, who owned Grassi Motors across from B&I Marketplace on South Tacoma Way and a restaurant called Polar Bear on 9th and Commerce downtown, carried Pizza Casa through the 1980s. Dan, meanwhile, spent 20 years in sales and operations with the Union Pacific Railroad before “retiring” in 1991.

“I asked my mother if she wanted to retire,” he recalled. “She was running it on her own. She said, ‘Oh God, yes!’”

He officially bought Pizza Casa in 1994.

PUGET SOUND PIZZA COMING TO LAKEWOOD

“It’s a love, it’s a family business,” said Harris, who had considered selling in recent years, particularly as he aged. He finally listed it a few months ago, receiving “lots of responses” before finalizing a deal with Puget Sound Pizza.

Cannell did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He shared the Lakewood expansion on the company’s social media pages Thursday, writing, “This beloved pizza place has been a local fixture for 65 years, and we’re looking forward to revitalizing the space and making new memories in this wonderful South Sound community.”

In the last couple of years, Harris said, he pulled back from intensive day-to-days, hiring a general manager; he was on-site daily in recent months, though. Asked what he would do in his second — and this time probably official — retirement, he laughed. “Try to enjoy it?”

He wished Puget Sound Pizza the best but also lamented the loss of retro family staples: “You can’t find a restaurant like ours — they’re dying.” When Pizza Casa opened, “There were no pizza places around. Nobody knew what pizza was in Tacoma — we were the first. For a lot of people, we’re the standard. Italian food was not known in the Northwest.”

PUGET SOUND PIZZA - LAKEWOOD

▪ 12924 Pacific Highway SW, Lakewood, pugetsoundpizza.com

▪ Tacoma-based pizzeria taking over longtime home of Pizza Casa; opening later this year

This story was originally published July 15, 2023 at 7:30 AM.