BY SKYLER, DEB & TIM SMITH
Pizza D’s has been fighting in the Mendon Pizza Wars for five years now, having taken over the old Pontillo’s location which operated in Mendon for 28 years. Since I am here to inform as well as entertain, here’s a road map. If you are crossing through the 4 corners of Mendon and heading north toward Pittsford, Pizza D’s has a prime location in Scheifen Plaza; they have the front location on the left side of the driveway.
If you ever wondered where the Pizza D’s name came from, it was derived from the partnership of Danny Walters and Jeff Dunlap who own and operate the restaurant. When I asked Danny what their signature dish would be he said, “Probably our grilled wings. Our approach is a little unusual in that we fry them and sauce them, then grill them and sauce them again.” I said, “Sounds good, we’ll order a dozen to go; make them extra hot!”
I asked Danny what the most memorable event was that had occurred since he’d been in business and he actually had one of the better stories I’ve heard in my series. He said, “On one February night I had just left the restaurant, and was driving north on Pittsford-Mendon Road when my phone rang. It was a member of my staff back at the restaurant telling me, ‘Danny, we have a car in the dining room’. I said, ‘You mean parked outside of the dining room?’ He said, ‘No, it is literally inside the dining room’ and I could tell by his voice that he wasn’t kidding.”
“I returned and sure enough there was a car right where table 3 used to be. What had happened was a young female driver had accidently hit the gas, rather than the brake, and right where my front window used to be there was now a car window. I liked the previous view better. Our surprise visitor was a large SUV, so there was probably five feet of vehicle in my dining room.”
“The scariest part however was that as she plowed through my wall, she had brought in with her a pedestrian who unfortunately happened to be walking on the front sidewalk at just the wrong time.” My thoughts go out to the pedestrian . . . talk about your unlucky day. One minute you’re nonchalantly strolling by your local pizza parlor and the next minute you are literally being driven through the wall of the building and find yourself trapped under the vehicle and pizza-parlor-pinned to the floor.
Hopefully the new expression I coined above is one that neither you nor I will ever have cause to use again. As a writer, I always find myself analyzing word usage, and I hereby throw out the following challenge to my readers. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re able to use the three word adjective pizza-parlor-pinned, please let me know. There has to be a great story behind it, and rest assured I will be contacting you for an upcoming article.
I do feel a little guilty joking about this, but the good news was that when this automobile accident occurred at Pizza D’s nobody was seriously injured, and the drive-thru that Danny had always been thinking about, had just been installed for free. While there are various ways to circumvent town zoning regulations, we don’t recommend this approach.
