My dad is really good at picking out restaurants. I think he has a different Yelp app than the rest of us. I don’t know how he does it, but I think for every one hundred restaurants he’s picked out on various vacations, there has only been one that has been mediocre.
The two times my dad went to Atlanta with me, once before I moved, and once to help me unpack, he kept up his reputation. We went to a fun bar where you could bowl with hand-sized balls. We went to a breakfast place with insane portions and homemade sweet tea. He found a cool biergarten across the street from the aquarium with delicious pretzels and mustards.
I’ve gotten sick of most of the restaurants I went to again after his trips were over. I don’t blame my dad for this. I really did enjoy them when I first visited. It was always just one bad experience that made me rethink every time I’d eaten there. The tacos were too greasy one day. The pita bread in the gyro was too cold. The fun bar was too loud. The pancakes were too doughy. And the comically large cockroach that skittered across the floor didn’t help.
But one restaurant has stood the test of mundanity: Johnny’s Pizza. While it is a part of a chain, it feels like a local pizzeria. I went there when my dad helped me move in. We got garlic knots, a pizza with sausage and pesto on top, and really good cheesecake. My fiance and I now go every Friday. The people that have worked there know our names, say “see you next week” when we leave, and wonder where we were if for some terrible reason we weren’t able to make it the previous week.
The best part about living somewhere is carving out spaces where people know who you are. While places fall around you, whether something as small as a miscooked meal or as big a possible health code violation, pillars always remain.
I love Johnny’s Pizza, but it’s not like it never has its bad days. The cinnamon knots are sometimes a touch overcooked, the crust a little too thin, but nothing could shake my desire to keep going back. In part, it is because the food, more often than not, is delicious. But maybe the larger part is that the space is special because of the community, and what my fiance and I were able to make of it.
It’s a small restaurant with eight booths lining the edges. You can look to see where they cook the pizzas past the counters. You can even see them throw the dough in the air, making the crust like they do in movies. They have sports on, sometimes really obscure ones. Once we were crammed into the same side of a booth watching the National Cornhole Championship.
My fiance and I have also had every conversation imaginable here. We’ve talked about the most tragic backstory on One Piece, our wedding colors, and our hopes for the future and why they may or may not work out. We’ve laughed about the most unhinged things, and tried to discreetly wipe sad tears from our eyes.
I don’t know exactly what it is about this one restaurant five minutes from my house that brings this all on, and I don’t know that I need to know. But I am grateful that there is a place in this city where, in a Cheers-like fashion, everyone knows my name. No one shouts “Norm!” when I walk through the door, but they do ask how my week was and bring us really good pizza that will feed us for two days. It’s the one constant in a sea of places that didn’t survive this onslaught of time.
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In light of the Israeli government bombing Rafah, a designated “safe zone” in Gaza where civilians were evacuated, I want to provide links to contact your government officials for a permanent ceasefire. I do not pretend to know solutions for this historic conflict, but I can recognize and call out genocide.
Click this link to learn the basics of the history and current war in Israel and Palestine. Click this link to read about the violence in Gaza from the perspective of a genocide scholar.
Click this link to send a pre-scripted email to your representatives. Click this link to make a scripted phone call to your representatives.

Kate DeHaan started Calvin as an engineering major and graduated (’22) with a bachelor’s in writing. She is currently working as an executive assistant for Mercer University’s student affairs. She also writes her own blog (LosingKate.com), practices martial arts, and takes full advantage of her apartment’s pool.
It really is those places where people know your name that make a city feel like home ☺️
It is nice! I’m sure you had those places in Hungary.