Looking to its past to build its future
Broadway Pizza was built on the Golden Rule.
When Lana Cox opened the restaurant in 1977, no matter how much money customers made or what they did for work or where they lived, Cox wanted everyone to feel welcome and made an effort to treat them well. That was likely the reason, at least in part, that the restaurant was able to survive, her grandson Adrian Ishee said.
“She was so kind to so many people and everyone wanted to see her business succeed,” said Ishee, who now runs the restaurant alongside his mother, Dewana Ishee, and other family members.
Their family has watched business ebb and flow as Broad Avenue transformed from a major Binghampton thoroughfare to a ghost town and then reemerged as an eccentric arts district.
Not one business that was open on Broad when Cox started selling pizzas 42 years ago is still there today, Dewana Ishee said, but Broadway Pizza is thriving.
‘Common sense and a whole lot of work ethic’
Cox grew up in Arkansas as the oldest of 17 children. She spent her childhood abused and neglected and subject to abject poverty, only completing a secondgrade education, Adrian Ishee said.
At 15, Cox ran away from home in search of a better life and was put into foster care with a Memphis family. While there, she started working at a pizza shop.
She spent more than a decade saving every dollar she could to eventually buy 2581 Broad Ave., the building that is now Broadway Pizza. Despite years of employment, when the owners of the pizza shop were ready to retire, they were worried that Cox, whose lack of education meant she still struggled to read and write, wouldn’t be able to run the business, so they sold it to new owners, Dewana Ishee said.
Cox stayed on and worked for that family for about one year before being forced out when they discovered she had purchased a building and was thinking about opening her own restaurant.
With few options, Cox, then 32, decided it was time to open. Her first step was to find a food supplier and got started. He gave her a week’s worth of food for free.
“He said, ‘If you make it, pay us back. If you don’t, you tried,’” Dewana Ishee said. Cox made it. Every day the restaurant opened at 10 a.m. and planned to close at 2 a.m. the following day. But most days it stayed open even later, feeding hungry patrons pouring into the streets each night from nearby bars and college students wandering over from campus.
“She only had a second-grade education, my grandfather finished the sixth grade,” Adrian Ishee said. “But they had a lot of common sense and a whole lot of work ethic.”
When Sam Cooper Boulevard was completed, it diverted most of the traffic from Broad Avenue. Around the same time, the legal drinking age changed from 18 to 21. Seemingly overnight, the college crowd and those passing through with the flow of traffic disappeared.
“We just watched everything close,” Dewana Ishee said. “Everything closed within the first two years.”
Wilson’s Plate Lunches around the corner closed, then Sears across the street closed, then the plumbing company and several other businesses followed.
“There were quite a few times when we got pretty close to going under,” Adrian Ishee said. “We did most of the work ourselves and didn’t take paychecks for a while.”
Their saving grace: Loyal customers and low overhead because Cox had already paid off the mortgage on the building.
When Cox died of cancer in 2008, she left half the business to her daughter and the other half was owned by Cox’s husband. About five years later, Dewana Ishee said she cashed out her husband’s retirement account to buy back the other half of the restaurant.
For the first year after that, business stayed slow, but then suddenly it picked up as new businesses moved in and started a grassroots effort to bring people back to the street.
Since then, each year at Broadway Pizza has been better than the last.
‘A little of the old and the new’
The hardest days are now behind the Ishee family. The Broad Avenue restaurant got so busy that they decided to open a second location on Mendenhall Road. Dewana Ishee figured that the second location would ease some of the pressure on the first Broadway Pizza but both restaurants only got busier, she said.
“It’s amazing how busy we are now than even two years ago,” Dewana Ishee said.
Ishee’s youngest son, Andrew Ishee, had spent most of his life working at the restaurant, and he told his mom he and his wife wanted to stay.
Adrian Ishee, the older of the brothers, had also worked in the restaurant, but he had graduated with a Master of Business Administration from the University of Memphis. He then went off to Italy and later started to apply for jobs at other companies. His family assumed he wouldn’t be working in the family business, but when he returned from Europe nine months later he knew he only wanted to work with his family.
“When I came back I pretty much dedicated myself to Broadway Pizza,” he said, adding that opening the second location was akin to starting a new business from scratch.
Even while planning for the future, the Ishees took a few lessons from Cox.
They didn’t rent their new building, they bought it. The family didn’t want the future of their new restaurant to be in the hands of a landlord, Adrian Ishee said.
They also kept the same local, family-owned food supply company that helped Cox start the restaurant more than four decades ago. Fayette Packing Co. still comes by several times a week to deliver fresh meat, which Adrian Ishee said is never frozen.
Finally, they make sure to keep their prices affordable. Their large pizza is still just $25 and big enough to feed a family of five.
While much has remained the same, the Ishees are also planning a few changes, particularly at the original Broad location. Some of it the customers won’t see — upgrades to the plumbing and electrical to make the restaurant more efficient. Other ideas include changes to the outside that customers won’t be able to miss.
Adrian Ishee said his family has entertained the idea of building in a garage-style door that can be rolled open to make room for outdoor seating in good weather. Dewana Ishee said they have also considered big glass storefront windows to match the new look of many of the old buildings on Broad.
The plans aren’t final yet but whatever they do, they want to make sure their regular customers will love it too.
“I think our customers would definitely enjoy a change to the storefront,” Adrian Ishee said. “We don’t want to lose that homey feel either. We’ll have a little of the old and the new.”
Desiree Stennett can be reached at desiree.stennett@commercialappeal.com, 901-5292738 or on Twitter: @desi_stennett.