You can have anything you want at Fricano's of Grand Haven Michigan.

You can have anything you want at Fricano's of Grand Haven Michigan. As long as you order a ten inch pizza pie with one or more ingredients in any combination: cheese, italian sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms, green pepper and anchovies. No ham? No pineapple? Apparently, this combination works because Fricano's has expanded to five locations. I sense a feud in the family, with the Grand Haven and Holland Fricano restaurants on one side. I often think a nice side salad could balance the menu out, but there's no printed menu either. It's a thin crusted pizza too, very light on the sauce. Plus, the cheese oil tends to saturate the crust so the fingers get slick. And this has been the formula since 1951.

The Fricano's Pizza Tavern is based in a long two story house that once served as a boarding house for factory workers in this industrial district. It was moved here from downtown Grand Haven in the first half of the twentieth century. I have heard one day in 1951, the tavern changed from soups and sandwiches to pizza and the regulars asked "what's a pizza"?

It's a night with temperatures in the teens, so I am sitting at a table near the kitchen with 750 degree Fahrenheit ovens. It helps but when the door opens, I still feel a whaft of the artic.