Our story
The Corrova familysince 1929
TAT opened in 1929 in a Columbus neighborhood that no longer exists, and it has never once left the family that started it.
CMH · July 9, 1929
Where the
name comes from
In the summer of 1929, Columbus was the middle link in the first transcontinental route across the United States. Passengers left New York by train, changed to a Ford Tri-Motor here, and reached Los Angeles in about 48 hours. It was the talk of the town.
The airline was called Transcontinental Air Transport. Pete Corrova watched those planes come and go while he was getting ready to open a restaurant on West Goodale Street, and he took the three letters off their tails.
The official version
T-A-T for the airline overhead — a brand-new restaurant borrowing the most modern name in the city.
The family version
When people from the airline came by to ask about it, Pete told them it stood for Take Any Table. His son Jimmy told customers the same thing for the next fifty years.
The long version
How we got here
-
1929
Flytown
Pete and Philomena Corrova open their first restaurant at 409 West Goodale Street, in the Depression-era neighborhood known as Flytown. Pete's recipes come from Sicily, Philomena's from Naples.
-
1930s
The first pizza in Columbus
Thicker crust, American cheese, nothing like it anywhere else in the city. It's the dish the restaurant is still known for, though the pie has moved toward classic Columbus style since the 1950s.
-
1950s
Forced out by the highway
New freeway construction cuts Flytown apart and TAT has to move. Pete and Philomena reopen on the growing east side, at East Main Street and South Hampton Road.
-
1955
The second generation opens its own
Jimmy Corrova and his wife Dolores open a second TAT at East Broad Street and James Road. A third follows in 1962 at Livingston and Beechwood, and a pizza carry-out on the west side after that — six delivery wagons and six hundred pizzas on a Friday night.
-
1979
Livingston and James
The family brings the east side restaurants together into a single dining room at Livingston Avenue and James Road. It hasn't moved since.
-
Today
Four generations of the Corrova family
Still family-owned, still cooking from the same recipes, and at Livingston and James since 1979.
In the kitchen
Nothing is
written down
Like most of the original Columbus pizzerias, TAT never kept written recipes. You learn a dish by standing next to someone who already knows it, and then you make it their way.
The pasta, the pizza, the soups, the Italian dressing and the sauces are all still made from scratch here. The dressing got popular enough that we started bottling it and shipping it to people who moved away.
See what's on the menuA small legal footnote
We own the words
"Poor Boy" in Ohio
In the 1960s, grocery chains around Columbus started selling frozen Poor Boy sandwiches. Jimmy Corrova, barely an adult, decided to sue them over the name.
Italian community leaders and lawmakers from both parties asked him to drop it, warning the fight would ruin the family business. He kept going. Six years later he won, and TAT has held the Poor Boy trademark in Ohio ever since.
The newspaper headline, as he remembers it: Judge Slices Up Sandwich Attorneys.
The family
Run by Jimmy's daughters
Jimmy Corrova started working here at seven and was running the register by nine, standing on a crate to reach it. He ran TAT for the rest of his life.
Today his daughters run it. Marianne looks after the dining room and Michelle runs the kitchen.
- MarianneOwner · front of house
- MichelleOwner · back of house
The banquet room
Room for 125
Retirement parties, rehearsal dinners, showers, holiday parties. We also send out party trays for carry-out — lasagna, spaghetti, pizza — if you'd rather host it yourself.
TAT opened in the Great Depression, lost its first building to a highway, and is still here ninety-seven years later, cooking the same food.