Brick Oven: Provo’s 70-Year-Old Pizza Parlor, Famous for Root Beer and First Dates

Every college town has a restaurant that shows up in a surprising number of love stories. In Provo, that restaurant is Brick Oven.

For 70 years, BYU students, Provo families and visiting grandparents have been squeezing into its booths for pizza, pasta and frosty mugs of homemade root beer. Plenty of them walked in on a first date and walked out, eventually, engaged.

From Stadium Lunch to “Heaps A Pizza”

Brick Oven’s story begins in 1956, when a corner cafe called Stadium Lunch started serving pizza. That made it one of the first pizza parlors in Utah, at a time when pizza was still a novelty in much of the state. A naming contest gave the place its first name: Heaps A Pizza, a play on the last name of its first owner. Longtime locals still call it “Heaps Brick Oven.”

In the early 1960s the restaurant changed hands. Glee Zumbrennen, who started working there in 1958, bought it in 1962. Back then it seated about 75 people on folding chairs. Over the next two decades it grew into a full family restaurant, took on the Brick Oven name, and expanded again in the 1980s to more than 400 seats.

The place where Provo falls in love

Ask around Provo and you’ll hear a local legend: work at Brick Oven and you’ll end up married. It’s not entirely a joke. Wedding photos of couples who met there once lined the lobby walls, and families make a point of stopping in after BYU games, temple visits and missionary drop-offs.

“Through time, there’s just been a lot of relationships,” director of operations Dan George told KSL for the restaurant’s 60th anniversary. At the time, he said it had grown into the largest pizza place in Utah.

Root beer since 1956

If Brick Oven has a signature, it’s the root beer. The restaurant has been making its own old fashioned root beer since 1956, and it arrives in a frosty mug that has become part of the ritual. The other cult favorite is the “green” ranch dressing, which regulars will tell you belongs on just about everything, crust included.

Nearly everything on the menu is made from scratch daily, according to the restaurant. Beyond pizza with its Romano crust, you’ll find pastas like chicken fettuccine alfredo and rosemary chicken tortellini, chicken Parmesan, a Harvest Chicken Salad, grinders, and chocolate mousse pie for dessert.

How to do Brick Oven right

• Start with a mug of root beer. It’s been made in-house for 70 years.
• Ask for green ranch. Dip your pizza crust in it. Trust the locals.
• Bring the whole family. It’s built for big groups, birthdays and post-game crowds.
• Save room for mousse pie. The chocolate mousse pie is a long-running favorite.

Seventy years is a long time for any restaurant, let alone one that started with folding chairs. Brick Oven has outlasted fads, rivals and generations of students by staying exactly what Provo needs it to be: a warm, busy, slightly nostalgic place to share a pizza with people you love.

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This spotlight draws on reporting from KSL, The Daily Universe, the Deseret News and a BYU ScholarsArchive case study. Photos are illustrative and were not taken at Brick Oven. Top photo: Markmark28, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.