My partner, Jim, hails from Manville, New Jersey, where he was born and raised. Manville and the surrounding towns are home to a sizable Italian community. Jim’s maternal grandparents migrated to the United States from Sicily in the 1920s.

When I first met Jim, he lamented the fact that Atlanta doesn’t have any “real” pizza restaurants. He insisted that you should be able to walk into a pizza restaurant, place an order and within minutes be enjoying a slice of piping hot pizza. The concept of ordering an entire pizza and waiting 20 to 30 minutes to be served was foreign to him.

Jim took me to Manville Pizza on my first visit with his family. They serve pizza, calzones, strombolis, and pasta dishes. I had to agree that walking into a restaurant and seeing an array of already-made pizza with a variety of topping to choose from was quite a treat. The perfect crust and sauce clearly showed that the family-run restaurant had mastered the art of pizza making.

Manville Pizza inspired this post. The sauce comes from Mary Polak, Jim’s mother, and I wrote about Mary’s Eggplant Parmesan in a previous post. I tend to follow Mary’s advice about making sauce. If you’re going to the trouble of making sauce, you may as well make a big pot of it. It freezes well or you can use it in a dish later in the week. You can consider making half of the recipe if you don’t want to use it for other purposes. Calzones are completely versatile and you can stuff them with most any ingredient you can imagine.