By Charlie Pogacar
The year was 1977, and Chip and Bridget Myles—a husband-and-wife duo—had recently opened up Myles’ Pizza Pub in Bowling Green, Ohio. A man approached Chip Myles and asked him a question in an incredulous tone.
As Chip recalled with a chuckle, “He said, ‘How do you think you’re going to make a living making pizza when there’s already two pizza houses in Bowling Green?’”
“Well, I accepted that challenge,” Chip said. “In my mind, I thought, ‘I can do a better job [making pizza].’ But out loud, I think I said something like, ‘I guess we’ll just see, won’t we?’”
Related: My Pi: How We Ship To Tens of Thousands of Customers Per Year
Nearly 50 years later, the Myles family can say they ran a successful and beloved business in Bowling Green for the better part of four decades. The pizzeria thrived with all types of customers: Families flocked to the pizzeria during the day, while college students from neighboring Bowling Green State University populated the joint during the late-night window.
When the Myles family ultimately closed the shop in Bowling Green in 2016, it wasn’t because business had finally slowed down. On the contrary, business was probably too good, and the aging couple was ready for a change of pace.
“It got to the point where I was good with the idea of slowing down,” Chip said. “The late-night shifts were getting a bit rough. I was in my mid-sixties by then. Working 16-18 hour days, I was at the end of that. I was looking forward to a change and a new challenge. I was interested to see: Could we recruit people to Myles’ Pizza Pub in a different town?”
When their daughter, Meredith, who helps run the business these days, announced plans to move south to Greenville, South Carolina, Chip and Bridget decided to follow suit. After a three-year break mostly spent looking for the perfect property in Greenville, the family reopened Myles’ Pizza Pub down south.
The business has hardly been quiet since opening back up in 2019. Already having established itself as a local favorite in Greenville, Myles’ Pizza Pub has also developed a new revenue stream: shipping its pizzas nationwide. That’s an arm of the business that Meredith has grown since the pandemic necessitated a shift in business strategy.
“I honestly would’ve thought it would have died down by now,” Meredith said. “But it hasn’t, it’s continued to grow, and we’ve done a lot of work to get our processes down.”
As of now, hungry customers can get overnight shipping to their house. It’s expensive, but many consumers still feel the pizza is worth it. Soon, Meredith added, they will be able to choose two-to-three day shipping and that will make the process a lot more cost-efficient for the customer.
The Myles family also could not have anticipated how many of their loyal patrons from the old Bowling Green location would travel out of their way for a bit of nostalgia. On any given day, the Greenville pizzeria might seat a half dozen different parties with at least one member who once ate the pizza in Ohio.
“I recently had a customer tell me that if our pizzeria is within four hours of where they happen to be traveling, they’ll make the detour,” Meredith said. “We routinely have people who [relocated from Bowling Green to] Raleigh or Charlotte and they will come just to have dinner and then drive back home. I knew that, when we reopened, people would want to come and experience the pizza again. I just didn’t in my wildest dreams expect it to this extent.”
This craze has become a new part of Myles’ Pizza Pub lore: The pizzeria sells shirts that say “I drove miles… for Myles’ Pizza Pub,” and bumper stickers that read, “This car drove to Myles’ Pizza Pub.”
These patrons come for a slice of nostalgia, sure, but they wouldn’t fly down nor drive four hours out of their way if the pizza at Myles’ Pizza Pub wasn’t dynamite. Little about the pizza has changed since the shop first opened in 1977. It is still made on a thick, fluffy crust with toppings piled high, edge to edge. The Myles family makes pizza that is almost a style unto itself.
“I’ve always thought that you should be able to sit down to eat a pizza and not be able to eat the whole thing and still have some left,” Myles said. “The pizza should have toppings from border to border, too, there should be a big half inch to an inch of crust. This is your meal: This should fill you up.”
But if you ask a member of the Myles family what really sets the pizza apart, you’ll get one answer: It’s all in the sauce. Chip Myles dreamed up the recipe with help from Bridget before they ever opened the pizzeria in Bowling Green. It is a secret sauce that Chip has guarded for decades—not even Bridget or Meredith know how it’s made.
“It’s a really well-seasoned, flavorful sauce,” Meredith said.
“When people [who] come to visit us from the north or fly into Greenville taste it, one of the comments they make is that they may not have had it for years, but they swear nothing about it has changed,” Chip said. “It’s a distinctive flavor—we want you to be able to eat Myles’ pizza and have it taste the same as it did 45 years ago, because nothing about what we do and how we do it has changed.”
The recipe is written down somewhere, all locked up, Chip said. Meredith admits, though, that at this point, her father has offered many times to show her exactly how the sauce is made.
“I’m reluctant,” she said. “That feels like a passing of the torch. And I’m not ready for that yet.”
