Marco’s Pizza

Marco’s Pizza is a pizza chain location in WaterSound Town Center offering authentic Italian-style pizza made with fresh dough daily, available for takeout and delivery. Tucked into the Town Center’s row of shops on US Highway 98, it is the kind of dependable, family-friendly option that pairs easily with a beach day when nobody wants to cook, or a quick lunch break between stops at the surrounding shops.

The chain traces back to Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco, who immigrated to the United States from Sulmona, Italy, at age nine and grew up steeped in Old World pizza traditions. In 1978, Pat opened the first Marco’s in Oregon, Ohio, just outside Toledo, building the business around a three-cheese blend and a secret sauce recipe that he and his father spent years refining. That commitment to craft is still baked into the brand’s slogan, “Cut Slices, Not Corners,” and its self-described “Ah!thentic Italian pizza,” a nod to the founder’s insistence on quality over shortcuts even as the company scaled up.

What started as a single Ohio storefront has grown into one of the fastest-growing pizza brands in the country, with more than 1,100 locations spread across 33 states plus Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. Much of that growth traces to 2004, when longtime restaurant executive Jack Butorac bought the franchise rights when Marco’s had only about 120 stores and then built out the national franchising system that took it nationwide. A 2012 partnership let Marco’s open locations inside as many as 350 Family Video rental stores, a distribution deal that pushed the brand into new markets quickly, and by 2014 Consumer Reports had ranked Marco’s the third-best pizza chain in America in its first appearance on that survey. Marco’s opened its 1,000th store in October 2020, in Kissimmee, Florida, fittingly awarded to immigrant entrepreneurs, a milestone reached even amid pandemic disruption and one that cemented its place among the top pizza chains by systemwide sales.

That fresh-dough promise is not just marketing. Every location mixes its dough in-store daily from spring wheat flour, filtered water, and high-quality yeast, keeps its three-cheese blend (four cheeses on the White Cheezy) unfrozen, and preps vegetables fresh in the kitchen rather than pulling from frozen bags, with premium, thick-cut meats sourced from vetted suppliers. A test kitchen back at headquarters in Toledo keeps developing new items using that same philosophy, so the menu has grown well past the original recipe without straying from Pat’s original standards.

The WaterSound Town Center location held its grand opening on a Monday morning in April 2023, celebrating with half-off pizzas for the first several hours after the doors opened, a fitting welcome for a store that has since become a go-to for takeout and delivery across WaterSound, WaterSound Origins, and the surrounding Inlet Beach area. Whether you are ordering a classic pepperoni after a long day at the beach or grabbing a quick slice between shops in the Town Center, the pizza arrives the same way it has since 1978: fresh dough, real cheese, and a sauce recipe that has not changed in decades.