photograph by michael donahue
L-R: Adrian, Denny, Dewana, and Andrew Ishee, shown here at the Mendenhall location.
In its 49-year history, Broadway Pizza has never operated on a street named “Broadway.” And they have never made the thin-crust, hand-tossed, New York-style pizza. Theirs is the Chicago-style, square-cut pizza, says Dewana Ishee, who owns Broadway Pizza with her husband, Denny.
The restaurant began at a little beer joint in Memphis called the Top Hat Lounge, says Ishee, the daughter of Broadway Pizza founder Jeanette Cox. Cox worked as a cook and server at the lounge, which was owned by her stepfather, Roy White. They sold little pizzas at the Top Hat.
Her mother then went to work for White after he opened White’s Pizza on Austin Peay Highway in Raleigh in the 1960s.
In 1977, after White sold that business for an Exline’s pizza location, Cox bought what became the first Broadway Pizza at 2581 Broad Avenue. “My mother couldn’t read or write,” says Ishee, “but she could cook.”
The building had housed the old La Rosa Tamale Company, but when Cox bought it, the place had been empty for 10 years. Owners of nearby restaurants, including Fat Jimmy’s Pizza on Summer Avenue, helped her mom get started.
“No matter how big or how small the order is, we get it done. Like the time they cooked 25,000 wings for FedEx. “We had friends, everybody, come and help us.” — Dewana Ishee
“Fat Jimmy took booths out of his restaurant and put them in our store because we had no tables or chairs,” Ishee says, while “Galler Foods gave her all the frozen and dried products we needed.” Cox told them if her restaurant made it, she’d pay them back, but they told her, “Don’t worry about it.”
Author photograph by Andrew Ishee. Cake photograph by Michael Donahue.
The author enjoys one of the restaurant’s 40 types of pizza. Their cakes are almost as popular as their pizzas.
The restaurant, which first opened as Jeanette’s Pizza, was a hit. Cox opened at 10 in the morning and stayed until closing — which was often very late. “Back then, when beer joints closed at 2 or 3 in the morning,” says Ishee, “you’d think it was noon at Broadway Pizza. We would be packed.”
Her mother even had to install a shower at the restaurant “because she didn’t have time to go home.”
Ishee’s step-dad, Doug Cox, left his construction business to help out at the restaurant after it became successful. “He had a sixth-grade education and mom, no education. She never went to school.” Customers liked her mother. “She was a straightforward, honest person,” and Ishee adds, “she was good to people and people were good to her.”
Ishee took over Broadway Pizza about five years before her mother died from cancer in 2008. She worked with her stepfather until she took over ownership in 2010. “I’ve been there my entire life,” she says. “I only had one other job. I worked at Libertyland when I was a little kid.”
The business also includes their sons, Adrian and Andrew. “I just about delivered my kids at the store,” says Ishee.
Fourteen years ago, the family opened a second location at 629 South Mendenhall. They sell about 40 types of pizzas at Broadway Pizza, but the “Broadway Special” (sausage, beef, pepperoni, Canadian bacon, mushrooms, olive, bell peppers, and onions) and the “Around the World” (beef, mushrooms, bell peppers, and onions) are their two most popular.
Asked what makes their pizzas special, she says, “No preservatives in our meat. We make everything fresh. And the cheese that goes on our pizza” — some 2,000 pounds a week, according to Ishee — “we chop that fresh every day.”
Meat-and-three soul food plate lunches are sold seven days a week only on Mendenhall, but their hamburger steak dinner, catfish dinner, chicken parmigiana, and spaghetti dinners are offered at both locations.
They began selling cakes on the counter at the Broad store. Originally, they made sheet cakes, but now they offer 10-inch, two-layer circular cakes. “We were just doing strawberry, chocolate, and German chocolate, and it grew,” says Ishee. Now the selections include maple bacon, turtle, strawberry lemonade, and orange creamsicle.
As for a third location, Ishee doesn’t want another brick-and-mortar store. But she is “in the process of looking at a Broadway Pizza food truck.”
They’d sell pizza as well as other items, including hamburgers, club sandwiches, and their cakes from the truck, which would be “more like a gourmet food truck. I’m leaning there now.”
Meanwhile, it’s business as usual at Broadway Pizza. “No matter how big or how small the order is, we get it done,” she says. Like the time they cooked 25,000 wings for FedEx. “We had friends, everybody, come and help us.”
And at the end of the day, she says, nobody asked to be paid. “They came in and did it because they wanted to see someone be successful. Getting the job done is the thing.”
Broadway Pizza, 2581 Broad and 629 S. Mendenhall
L-R: Adrian, Denny, Dewana, and Andrew Ishee
