With pizza on his mind, and on several of this issue’s pages, the columnist made a triumphant return to the oldest Round Table in the world.
On El Camino Real in Menlo Park, just steps from a few amazing bookstores and several Metro racks, I waltzed into Round Table Pizza, the same continuous operation that started with the very first Round Table pizza parlor that Bill Larson opened in 1959. The story is not new, but the physical spot and the legend both deserve to be revisited. In a great way, it does not sit in some hideous strip mall next to a Jamba Juice, a Chase Bank and a Panda Express. Even with gentrification looming in every direction, this stretch of El Camino still retains a little bit of character here and there. Fortunately.
The current Round Table building, while not the original structure, contains all the history. As the plaque inside the place tells us, Larson had $1800 and a dream. He built the first restaurant literally by hand, making tables out of local redwoods and spare doors. The name Round Table came from his very first table. This is how, and where, the whole damn Round Table Pizza chain started…