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Here’s a perfect end to a weekend in the Western Catskills: travel south on Route 97 toward Interstate 84. For forty miles you’ll cruise along the Delaware River past picnic spots, bald eagle lookouts, and antique stores, until the road climbs high above the river to a section known as the “Hawk’s Nest.” It’s one of the most scenic roadway vistas in the state. Just as you start grinning like a happy dog in the wind, your soul hungry for small town life, you’ll shoot out of the forest and onto a block of 1930’s homes with big front porches. You’re in Port Jervis. Welcoming you on the right, is a small, boxy old tavern called Len and Jo’s Pizzeria. I urge you to go inside.
Like all great old pizza taverns, it’s split between a bar side and a restaurant side. On the bar side, from open to close, five or six men drink Busch Light, sunglasses on their heads, as the rhythmic buzz of televised Nascar lulls them into quiet tranquility. Occasionally, another arrives and tries to rouse the group with insults before ordering a beer and joining the meditation. On the restaurant side, young and old gather in booths under shelves lined with antique model trains and pictures of race cars. Almost everyone is eating half-sheet pans of a curiously brown and extra crispy pizza.
As you sit in a back booth, you’ll notice the snarling taxidermied boar’s head and several buck’s heads mounted on the wood paneling and wonder “Do these people have guns?” and they might. In any case, when you’re approached by a waiter you are made to feel welcome. That’s especially true if your waiter is third-generation owner Jeremy Markle.
Middle aged, wiry, with short brown hair, he projects a calm, earnest cheer, even with 24 pizzas in the oven and 12 hours of work on the clock. He says, “The mixed pizza is the most popular.” It’s extra brown because it is made with a mixture of American and mozzarella cheeses. “The whole thing tastes like the crispy bits of cheese that fall on the pan when you make a grilled cheese sandwich,” Markle says. They also serve an all-American cheese pizza, an all-mozzarella cheese pizza, the Len and Jo’s special (a sausage, pepperoni, onions, mushrooms, and anchovy pizza), and the first new pizza in many decades, the hellboy: a mixed cheese pie with pepperoni and hot honey.
Markle says, “On a busy night, we can serve a hundred pizzas an hour, just eat in and take out; we don’t deliver.” This is a feat for a tiny tavern. Also, despite the bar only seating about ten, Markle proudly claims they go through more kegs of Busch Light than anywhere in the Hudson Valley (he saw a distributor’s data sheet).
Of course, order the mixed pizza and a pitcher of Busch Light, (or if you must, Yeungling) and settle in. After eating a few narrow rectangles of this deeply satisfying pizza, and washing it down with beer, you’ll tune into Nascar or basketball, and have a hard time getting up. Way out at the edge of the wilderness, the hideaway has drawn and maintained clientele with this simple formula since 1943.
Len and Josephine Sarro, an Italian American couple who lived next door, first converted the old auto mechanic’s shop into a pizza tavern that year. They developed those American cheese pizzas during the stateside mozzarella shortage of World War II. At the time, Port Jervis was a railroad hub, with twenty lines running through town. Railroad workers, joined by Catskill mountain hunters, racecar drivers, and mechanics, packed the restaurant every night.
Markle’s parents bought the place in 1973. He said, “It’s funny we ended up working our whole lives in an old auto shop. My dad was a top Ford technician and I’m a mechanic by trade, too.” That’s the condensed version. Markle has been a pizza maker, racecar driver, competitive ballroom dancer, athlete, and stage actor, performing in such roles as “Lenny” Of Mice and Men, and “Atticus Finch” in To Kill a Mocking Bird while learning automotive welding at Adirondack Community College. When he returned home from college, he resumed racing cars professionally while working alongside his parents for twenty years.
Only when Markle’s parents handed over the keys to the restaurant in 2005, did he turn over the keys to the race car. Markle frankly revealed, “by the time I took over I had thirteen concussions and two comas.” He said, “One time I flipped my car on the front stretch, but flips aren’t that bad; they absorb the impact. The worst was when I ran right into the wall.” The menacing cars in the photos surrounding the bar are called “big block modified dirtracers.” The unwieldy, super-high-horsepower style of racing developed just after World War II in upstate NY. It is popular around the Northeast and Canada, but especially in Orange, Ulster, and Sullivan counties of New York. Today there are far more race car drivers at the bar than railroad workers. Markle still keeps trophies around the place, but driving, like most of his life’s vocations, has been stripped back to reveal the oldest one: cook.
Markle says, “Really, I’m the President, CEO, dishwasher, and cook.” He works twelve to fifteen hours a day, preparing all of the dishes he and his parents learned from the Sarro’s. The menu goes beyond pizza. The Markle’s are not Italian (they are German and Irish), but the Sarro’s taught them to make antipasti, eggplant, veal for scallopini and cutlet, sauce for homemade lasagna and the pizza, and dough. Markle still butchers a leg of veal each week, the same way Mr. Sarro taught him, and he still makes all the pizza dough. He said, “I use a dough roller that’s been here since the 50’s. The whole process takes three days—the temperature and humidity have to be just right—so when we run out of pizza it’s a problem.”
Markle’s three teenage kids, thus far, are not thinking about the business. Markle aunts, a couple of whom were working there for fifty or sixty years have retired, but Markle is still going strong. He maintains the recipes and most of the fixtures himself, and when he’s short staffed his regulars know the rhythm well enough to throw on an apron and join the dance.
The place isn’t just his inheritance, it’s the town’s inheritance. Every sign and symbol in the place says, “this is ours.” Patrons raced the cars in the pictures, their parents hunted for the bucks on the walls, and their great-grandparents worked on trains like the models overhead. For generations, those bar stools and booths have been a place to rest, where every social and somatic need is nurtured. Passing through, you might wish you had a comforting home base that’s endured through the ages. Still, it’s nice to feel full and welcome, even if it’s just for one long afternoon. - Mike Diago
📍 Len and Jo’s
186 W Main St, Port Jervis, NY 12771
Mike Diago is an award-winning food writer, home cook, and High School Social Worker living in the Hudson Valley.
