SLICE OF HISTORY
Manville Palace Pizza marks their 50th year in business
LINCOLN – When your neighborhood business has been around for 50 years like Manville Palace Pizza, it is safe to say you have to remain focused on serving your customer base.
And that is what is what Tarkan Akin and Ozan Sonmez have been doing while running Manville Palace Pizza for the past 12 years.
Taking a page from how the business was founded by the late Sevim Urul, originally from Turkey, and run by her family for many years, Akin and his business partner, also natives of Turkey, have stuck to the restaurant’s longstanding traditions of almost always being available to provide pizza and sandwiches to the surrounding working class neighborhood.
Manville Palace Pizza opens at 11 a.m. each day and doesn’t shut down until 4 a.m.
It offers delivery service up to 15 miles away and can reach all of the Blackstone Valley including Cumberland and Lincoln, Woonsocket, North Smithfield, Smithfield, Bellingham and Blackstone.
“It’s a good location, we are right on the main road on Railroad
Street, and Manville is just a small village in Lincoln,” Akin said. “We are the only pizza restaurant in Manville and we know many of our customers,” he added. “It’s like a tradition for them to come here,” he said while explaining how the parents in local families came to the business when they were younger and now their grown children and even grandchildren may be customers.
Fridays and Saturday nights are still the most popular nights for pizza, specialty subs or dinners, and its Sicilian-style 12x18-inch pizzas
are still tops in the pizza department.
The pizza dough is made fresh every day and there are also Mediterranean-style and specialty pizzas of all sorts on the menu, including the new Fenway with sausage, peppers, onions and mushrooms.
Other dinner options are the spaghetti or ziti pasta meals, calzone wraps, sandwiches and wings, and even fish and chips, or desserts.
The restaurant stays open until 4 a.m. – also a Manville Palace Pizza tradition – and operates its delivery service right through closing.
Akin said the business is also staying up with current market trends and will be
kicking off its new mobile phone app for Android or Apple on Dec. 1. Customers will be able to use the mobile Manville Palace Pizza App to place an order while saving 10 percent on the overall charge, or visit the restaurant’s website, www.manvillepalace.com, to place an order.
After operating in the same location for 50 years, Akin said the restaurant has a lot of history – like the fact site was once even a car dealership in downtown Manville with a car lot across the street that is used for extra parking today.
The restaurant can seat 28 in its booths and there is a big screen television on which customers can watch games
and other events while they eat.
With a tried and true business format, Akin said he and Sonmez would like to expand Manville Palace Pizza to a second location nearby in Providence. “We want to keep the same recipes and the same name but expand to another location,” he said.
As for Manville, Akin said the Town of Lincoln has been conducting a lot of road and sidewalk improvement work in the area and the village is becoming a better place to live as the work wraps up.
“I think Manville is becoming more of a family place and it is very good to be here. I like it, yes I do,” Akin said.