Struthers City Council recognizes The Elmton

By jeanne starmack

starmack@vindy.com

struthers

The writing wasn’t on the wall, but it was on the window of the bar and restaurant John A. Walters started in 1945.

Walters started The Elmton as a bar, but then he started serving pizza.

Did he have a special Italian recipe?

No, said his grandson Jack Walters, who now runs the Elmton with his mother, Marianne. John Walters was German, not Italian. But he experimented on customers until he got it right.

One night, as the story goes, a customer tasted one of those experiments and proclaimed, “Now that’s real pizza.”

On his way out, he wrote the words “real pizza” on the window. When the window steamed up, the words were visible. The Elmton’s reputation as the place to get real Italian pizza was born.

Today, the restaurant has changed. It’s grown bigger, with his grandfather’s dream of making the bar into a restaurant now a reality, said Walters.

But the pizza hasn’t changed.

The restaurant starts making its own dough, which is never frozen, at 4:30 a.m. It has two pizza ovens and no conveyor belts — the pizzas are baked on bricks. Every pie has green peppers on it because that’s the way his grandfather did it, Walters said.

If you aren’t in the mood for pizza, you could always try the broasted chicken.

The Elmton acquired a Broasters franchise in 1958, and the fresh chicken is marinated, breaded and cooked under pressure for 9 minutes. It doesn’t absorb the oil like traditionally fried chicken does, he said, so it’s better for you.

In between its two signature favorites is a full menu of dinners and sandwiches.

On Fifth Street between Elm and Sexton streets for 65 years, The Elmton (the name’s a combination of Elm and Sexton) has been such a community fixture that the Struthers City Council thanked the owners with a proclamation at a recent meeting.

Read the full story Monday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com.