Local pizza parlor proprietors showed off their wares last month. At left: Ha Ha Pizza’s owner Patrick Grzelak proudly holds up a quintessential pepperoni pie, featuring Ezzo pepperonis that cup just the right amount of grease. At right: Bentino’s owners Kim and Carl Lea show off their specialty Greek pizza, packed with garlic, pesto, spinach, onions, tomatoes, mozzarella and feta. These pies may be far from alike, but the physical distance between them could hardly be closer. Though Bentino’s and Ha Ha Pizza are right across the road from one another, the two parlors make it work. (Photos by Reilly Dixon)
A tale of two pies
- Published: January 6, 2026
For a little village of about 3,700 people, it may seem strange to see two pizza parlors sharing the same downtown — let alone, sitting across the street from one another.
At the corner of Xenia Avenue and Corry Street is Bentino’s Pizza. Directly across the way is Ha Ha Pizza. Both are longtime Yellow Springs staples, and on the right day, with the right breeze, you’ll smell both their ovens hard at work from the bike path.
Ask any townie, and they’ll tell you which they prefer. One sauce is more savory, the other more sweet; one boasts a golden wheat crust, the other, an undercarriage peppered with salt and cornmeal. While Bentino’s is wont to draw its stylings from the Mediterranean, Ha Ha tends to pull from the Big Apple.
Suffice it to say, Bentino’s and Ha Ha serve up considerably different pies, but both share similar trials and triumphs in the small-town pizza-making business.
So, what’s the secret? How do the two joints make it work?
“I really don’t think we’re in competition with one another,” Bentino’s co-owner Carl Lea told the News, gesturing across the street.
“At the end of the day, us and Ha Ha’s are just so different,” Lea said. “It’s more like we’re both competing with all the other restaurants in town for the food dollar. When people come to town, they’re looking for a place to eat, and bringing them to us is a challenge we all have. The Tavern, Peach’s, Sunrise — all of us.”
In a separate interview, Ha Ha owner Patrick Grzelak said as much.
“I’m not competing with Bentino’s or Domino’s or Cassano’s,” Grzelak said. “In my mind, I’m up against parlors in New York, in Columbus, in Chicago — the places that inspire the kind of pizza we’re trying to make here.”
Like Bentino’s, Grzelak’s parlor does the best on warm, summer days — specifically, tourist season in Yellow Springs.
“We’ll always have a solid base of consistent regulars, but our curve is dictated by tourists,” Grzelak said. “Walk-ins are our bread and butter. Call-ins pay the bills, but walk-ins make the difference.”
In making up that difference, Grzelak admitted Bentino’s has a slight advantage: They deliver, but Ha Ha doesn’t — not yet at least.
“It’s coming soon,” Grzelak said. “I’m doing DoorDash and Uber Eats for now, but Ha Ha’s delivery is coming one day. I promise.”
While Bentino’s pizza delivery service “carries the business,” as Lea put it, and distinguishes it from the across-the-road neighbor, dine-in has become a more recent focus.
The Leas — Carl and his wife, Kim — opened up Bentino’s at 107 Xenia Ave. in 2006, when Carl sought to fill a gap he noticed in Yellow Springs: too few delivery options. In the 19 years since, the business has grown in both its culinary stylings and in physical size. The Leas purchased their building in 2022 after Subway moved out of the adjacent space and left town; and in November 2024, the couple cut the ribbon on an expanded dining room.
“Some days, the whole dining room is filled, and some days, we’ll only have two tables,” Lea said. “It’s started to take off — people eating here — but there are still folks in town who’ve still never set foot in the restaurant. All they do is order out.”
He added: “This new phase reminds me a lot of when we first opened. We’re having to really build a new kind of customer base.”
Across the way, Grzelak has likewise done a number of improvements to his dining room — and the restaurant as a whole.
Grzelak purchased Ha Ha Pizza in fall 2023, and in doing so, inherited a more than half a century of local pizza lore and expectations for the 108 Xenia Ave. location.
As legend has it, and as longtime village resident Andy Holyoke wrote to the News, Ha Ha’s was started in the ’70s by a trio of artists from Ann Arbor. According to Holyoke the group of guys — Jim, Greg and Les — patterned their new joint off a parlor in Michigan dubbed Pizza Bob’s. The name, Ha Ha Pizza, Holyoke said, was chosen by the group “to remind themselves not to take it too seriously.”
Grzelak said he took the reins looking for a challenge, wanting to be his own boss and assume leadership of a team of his own making.
“When I stepped in, there was an employee literally skateboarding in the shop. So, I was like, ‘OK, I think I can make some changes here,’” he said with a laugh.
The first order of business, Grzelak said, was to talk to long-time customers and villagers and figure out what worked and what didn’t, what folks liked and what could be improved.
“So, much to some chagrin, I had to get rid of the salad bar,” Grzelak said. “It was just a huge loser for the business.”
Shortly after, he turned his attention to the building itself. Grzelak scrubbed off the yellow exterior paint in favor of a white veneer — “A symbolic blank slate,” he said. — and redid the interior with brand new booths, a refurbished bathroom and a new paint job on the walls, borrowing from longstanding motifs.
“So, the ‘Pizza Is Better Stoned’ phrase you see is a double entendre,” Grzelak explained. “Sure, there’s the marijuana parallel, but we’ve always used hot stones in our ovens — not a roller, but the kind of stones you’d see in New York kitchens.”
Therein lies one of the culinary approaches that differentiates Ha Ha Pizza’s approach from its across-the-way neighbor’s.
Bentino’s relies on a convection conveyor belt oven to cook its pies, and the Leas said that they and their staff don’t skimp on quality or attention.
“At every turn, all our ingredients are as fresh as possible,” Carl Lea said. “And when you put quality produce together, it’s pretty easy to make a good pizza.”
Lea said Bentino’s abides by a simple edict: consistency. Every single employee — about 20 as of press time, Lea said — is trained to follow the same recipe and create the same tried-and-true pizzas that customers have come to expect.
Bentino’s recipe, as locals can attest, is uniquely sweet. Though the Leas couldn’t divulge all their secrets, the couple said that a dash of sugar helps cut the natural acidity of the California-grown tomatoes they use.
“We use a sauce from Stanislaus — what is basically the Cadillac of pizza sauces,” Lea said with a wink.
Of Bentino’s characteristic grease, co-owner Kim Lea said: “We like to go for a ‘good grease.’ Not too much, but just the right amount. The pizza dough comes from the Dayton-based Cassano’s Dough Factory and is the same used in the parlor’s garlic knots and calzones — and regardless of the form, reliably toasts to a golden brown.
The couple agreed that their signature pizza — the dish they do best — is “The Greek,” an olive oil and garlic base, with pesto, spinach, onions, roma tomatoes, mozzarella and feta cheese.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever been disappointed with that one,” Kim Lea said.
Despite that and other trans-Atlantic borrowings, Carl Lea said Bentino’s strives to slice a style of its own.
“At the end of the day, what we aim for is a Midwestern-style pizza,” he said. “We want people to think of us as a ‘mom-and-pop.’”
On the other side of 68, Grzelak said his style may appeal more to New York expats, though he characterizes his slices as “artisanal Midwest.”
So, unlike Bentino’s, Ha Ha sells by the slice — when available — and Grzelak said that many of his relied upon recipes have been passed down to him from past owners. He said he still follows the wisdom inscribed in B.J. Walters’ black binder — though it’s mostly “stream-of-consciousness scribbles,” Grzelak said — and he’s kept the classic wheat crust, save for some minor improvements.
Grzelak said his sauce depends on peeled pomodoros from the San Marzano region in Italy, and that he and his crew of nine workers follow the “old world” style of squashing tomatoes by hand and making the dough from scratch.
“I don’t think we need sugar in our sauce,” Grzelak said. “If your tomatoes are good enough, you don’t need it.”
While both Bentino’s and Ha Ha’s pizza ingredients run the gamut of eccentricity — the former having artichoke hearts and almonds, the latter retaining bananas and broccoli — Grzelak made sure to clear one thing up: Contrary to local legend, Ha Ha Pizza does not serve psychedelic mushrooms.
“I’ll wait on FDA approval for that one,” he said.
Differences aside, both Grzelak and the Leas share something in common — making enough dough to cover costs can be quite a challenge.
With the regular winter slump in sales just beginning, both pizza parlors are cutting back and girding their kitchens for the slow months ahead.
So it goes in Yellow Springs — as the temperatures drop, so do sales, said the Leas.
“But one time, I had my busiest day ever during a blizzard,” Carl Lea said. “I think I made over 80 deliveries in one shift!”
The couple hopes to be that fortunate again this winter. With mounting medical expenses from managing Kim’s multiple sclerosis, the payroll needed to replace her once-regular presence in the kitchen and the debt they incurred in expanding their dining room — taken together, money is tighter than ever.
The same holds true across the road.
“March until October, we’re good,” Grzelak said of Ha Ha’s sales. “After Thanksgiving break, we’re done. We could close now until my birthday in January and we’d be fine.”
The pressure of keeping a tight margin is personal for Grzelak — taking care of his employees is his number one priority.
“I take a lot of pride in my low turnover here,” he said. “I’m trying my hardest to treat my employees like my family. These are folks who depend on this place to pay their bills — folks who I try to take into consideration with every decision I make.”
Like Bentino’s, and true to its Antiochian roots, Ha Ha Pizza is almost entirely staffed by young people — several of whom who’ve stuck through the changes in ownership over the last few years.
Bentino’s has also benefitted a great deal from the local youth. Many of their staff are village teenagers looking to make an extra buck after school lets out. And as the Leas said, when they clock on, the learning continues.
“Now more than ever, we’re more interested in teaching young people how to work in restaurants — showing them what a healthy work environment can look like, and that not every first job has to be toxic,” Kim Lea said.
She continued: “I mean, we really love the kids in this town — watching them grow and learn new skills. In that way, I think Bentino’s has really helped serve this town in more ways than just making pizza.”
Whatever the culinary differences and negligible proximity to one another, and despite the pressing economic ails of every independently owned business — in Yellow Springs and beyond — both Bentino’s Pizza and Ha Ha Pizza have no plans of going anywhere anytime soon, their owners said.
Perhaps, then, there’s enough for everyone to enjoy a slice of the village pie.
ED NOTE: The story has been updated since its original publication in the Jan. 2, 2026 issue of the News to reflect a more accurate origin story for Ha Ha Pizza.
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