The restaurant recently closed on Tuesdays and reduced its hours to 11 a. The 6, square foot building on 1. The restaurant offered stone-baked pizzas with names like Kosmic Karma, Funky Q. Chicken and Wild in Havana. Its bar had 36 draft beers.
There is psychedelic rock music art throughout the building. One of its most notable features is an foot tall, foot long yellow submarine in which people can dine inside.
Readers of The Lima News selected it as the No. By David Trinko - dtrinko limanews. David Trinko The Lima News. Restaurant management did not return a call seeking comments Friday. However, if you're a tried-and-true Mellow Mushroom fan, you likely already know about the Southern crust style, the amazing artwork, and the gluten-free menu — but do you know about the eco-friendly pizza boxes, Mellow Mushroom's expansive philanthropic efforts, or the Mellow Mushroom founding fathers?
If you thought your college days were wasted because you barely went to class or maybe you, on the flip side, worked too hard and played too little, you won't want to compare yourself to the Mellow Mushroom founders. Despite being college students, the two thought they could handle starting up a business on top of classes and they opened the doors of the first Mellow Mushroom on Spring Street in Atlanta, near the Georgia Tech campus.
Possibly thanks to years of prior pizza experience under the belts both young men had worked in various pizza restaurants up until this point, to pay for college , the idea succeeded.
While Nicholson graduated the same year the first restaurant opened, Reeves didn't graduate until , but that didn't stop the two from expanding their business quickly, into surrounding Southern states.
If you're going to open a pizza joint near a college campus, with the kind of branding that's naturally going to appeal to college kids, then you'd better put together a menu with prices that college kids can afford — and that's exactly what Rocky Reeves and Mike Nicholson did. Pizza and beer have been the staple menu items at Mellow Mushroom locations ever since.
Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll bring it back again in , for their 50th birthday bash? Every single Mellow Mushroom location is locally owned and operated, according to the brand. Not only does this mean that each location just naturally offers a little bit of its own local flair, but Mellow Mushroom actually encourages it.
Every location's artwork and decor is different, reflecting the local vibe and art of local artists. But opening your own local Mellow Mushroom doesn't come easy. Franchisees also have to sign a non-compete agreement, or face some serious repercussions.
In , one franchisee who operated three Mellow Mushroom locations in North Carolina closed their locations and opened their own pizza pubs in the same buildings, and Mellow Mushroom's parent company quickly took legal action , asking the former franchisees to shut down their locations and return all their branded merchandise and equipment.
So who is Mellow Mushroom's parent company? It's Home Grown Industries of Georgia. However, Home Grown Industries of Georgia isn't some big restaurant conglomerate that oversees several different brands, similar to, for example, Yum!
Home Grown Industries is the business's registered company name, while Mellow Mushroom is the trade name. Even though Mellow Mushroom has a fancier name these days, though, it's still headquartered in Atlanta, just about a half-hour drive away from where the original restaurant was located.
Rocky Reeves and Mike Nicholson are no longer the owners, though; that role has been passed to Richard Brasch , who now acts as owner, president, and CEO. According to Business Insider , Brasch's relationship with Mellow Mushroom goes way back; he worked for the first Mellow Mushroom restaurant in what he calls its "chaotic early days.
You know New York City-style pizza. You know Chicago deep dish pizza. But Southern pizza? What exactly makes a pizza "Southern"? According to Mellow Mushroom and Business Insider , who notes that Mellow Mushroom is the only chain in the world that offers this particular style of pizza, the Southern pizza a term that Mellow Mushroom trademarked, by the way style all comes down to the crust.
Mellow Mushroom creates its pizza crust with Appalachian spring water and plenty of garlic, to create a crust that's thicker than New York City-style pizza, thinner than Chicago deep dish, slightly chewy and full of flavor. The Appalachian spring water is shipped out to all of the restaurant locations, no matter where they are, it's so vital to the crust-making process.
Other dough ingredients include high-protein, un-bromated, unbleached wheat flour, but no refined white sugar. After all the ingredients are blended, the dough is hand-tossed and stone-baked. The result? Southern-style pizza.
Mellow Mushroom started out with its humanoid, yellow, totally stoned mushroom character, Mel O. Mushroom, but, over the years, the restaurant has expanded its list of characters to include a range of humanoid-like mushrooms, animals, and mythical creatures, all of which live on the Mellow Mushroom Mothership, reports the brand. The characters have appeared on Mellow Mushroom merchandise, on marketing materials, and more, and range from a pretzel-zapping wizard to a bespectacled dragon named Hummus to Esperanza the Fairy.
There's also the Harshinator, who "harshes your mellow," and Cappy the Elf, who sports a mushroom-cap hat. Described as "not your average food trailer," the Mellow Mushroom Bake Bus is exactly that — more of a colorful hippie van meets pizzeria on wheels than any food truck.
Serving Mellow Mushroom's favorite menu items, as well as, on occasion, music, the Bake Bus isn't a feature at every single Mellow Mushroom location, so you're lucky if you spot one. The Bake Bus shows up at special events, such as new restaurant openings to drum up excitement and business, but also at sporting events, festivals, concerts, breweries, etcetera. In one instance, according to Pizza Today , the Bake Bus even showed up at a wedding and celebrated a bride and groom who'd frequented their local Mellow Mushroom throughout their love story.
If you want to get the Bake Bus for your own wedding, though, you'll need to call headquarters, like this bride did. The Bake Bus seems to come and go at corporate's whim and isn't available for just any, ordinary catering job.
Do you ever think about what happens to your pizza box after you toss it into the trash or recycling bin? If you tossed it in the former, you probably think you did your part in creating a cleaner planet, but, in actuality, according to Stanford University , pizza boxes can't be recycled. The grease and cheese soil the cardboard, resulting in paper that can't be used a second time. So when the recycling team finds a pizza box in your bin, they likely are tossing it into the trash. From there, a pizza box will take at least 90 days to degrade in the landfill, and with three billion pizza boxes tossed each year, that's a lot of trash.
Luckily, Mellow Mushroom is thinking green with its pizza boxes. The soy ink printing on the box is even environmentally friendly, too.
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