Here's Where Lansing Was First Introduced to Pizza: 1951

When you’re stumped as to what to have for dinner or lunch, and you really don’t have time to make an elaborate dinner – or you’re just too plain tired – what do most of us turn to? Pizza!

Pizza places are now a dime a dozen in the Lansing area and it’s not hard to fine one. With the seemingly endless choices one has for pizza it makes you wonder: just where was the first pizza place in Lansing?

Lansing was introduced to pizza on February 8, 1951 when it was served up in Falsetta’s Casa Nova restaurant.....who proudly call themselves “the first pizza place in town”.

Get our free mobile app

Old-timers recall those early Falsetta’s pizzas. As mentioned in a City Pulse article, one person wrote “I went with my dad in his beat-up Chevy work truck to pick up the best pizza in town. The pizza weighed as much as a newborn, it was so loaded with ingredients. It came snugly plastic-wrapped, with toppings buried below a bulging crown of perfectly charred mozzarella.” I couldn’t have said that any better.

In the early 1950s, most people had no idea what pizza was. I remember my dad bringing home our first pizza and I looked at it like “yech!” All that red stuff smeared all over it made my stomach queasy. Why? Because it looked like something else I had eaten that made me throw up...so naturally I stayed away from this flat, sloppy red thing that was on our dinner table. It took months until I finally tried it...been hooked ever since.

Falsetta’s started at the corner of Mt. Hope and Logan, then at the corner of Goodrich and Logan until 1977. It then relocated to Logan and Dunlap for thirteen years, until it moved to its current spot on Waverly Road.

Founder Bill Falsetta passed away in 2016 at the age of 95.....but his legacy lives on in his pizzas at Falsetta’s Casa Nova on Waverly Road.