Brick Oven: Seventy Years on One Provo Corner

Abigail Giordano Senior Writer, Provo.com

There is a corner in Provo — 800 North, a couple of blocks south of BYU — where a restaurant has been quietly eating the neighbourhood for seventy years.

That is not a metaphor. Over the decades, a cafe, a dry cleaner, a market, a barber shop and four houses have been absorbed into what is now Brick Oven. The restaurant did not move to accommodate its success; it expanded outward into whatever was next door.

2026 is its seventieth year. That is the reason to write this now, and it is the sort of anniversary a college town tends to miss, because the students who make up half the customer base turn over every four years and inherit the place fully formed.

1956: Stadium Lunch becomes Heaps A Pizza

In 1956, a corner establishment called Stadium Lunch was converted into one of the first pizza parlours in Provo — and, by several accounts, one of the first in Utah.

That timing is the thing to sit with. In 1956 in Utah, pizza was a novelty food most people had never eaten. A later Brick Oven executive described customers of the era as largely unfamiliar with what others were calling "pizza pie." This was not opening a pizzeria into an existing market; it was introducing the product.

The name came from a contest, which the restaurant still says on its own site: the winning entry was "Heaps A Pizza" — a pun on the surname of the man who opened it, Kent Heaps. (His first name is printed as both Kent and Ken across sources; Kent is the more commonly published and appears in the more substantial coverage.)

⚠ There is a second small conflict worth naming rather than smoothing over. Brick Oven's own materials describe Stadium Lunch as a corner cafe. BYU's student newspaper, in a 1999 profile drawing on an interview with a former owner, describes Heaps as the man who bought the corner grocery store and turned it into a pizza joint. Those are different buildings doing different things. Both accounts are otherwise consistent, and this page states the disagreement rather than picking a winner.

It shortened to Heaps, and eventually became Brick Oven — and this is where the record gets genuinely muddled.

Nobody agrees on when it became Brick Oven

Three sources, three answers:

• A 2002 BYU business-school case study, the most granular account available, says that by 1970 the pizza shop had been remodelled into a 236-seat family restaurant and "a decision was made to change the name to Brick Oven Restaurant."
• A local history project dates the change to 1974.
• BYU's student newspaper in 1999 says that "up until the mid seventies, Brick Oven was known as Heaps of Pizza."

So: 1970, 1974, or somewhere in between. The likeliest reconciliation is that a decision taken around 1970 took several years to become the name everybody used, which is how restaurant renames usually go. But that is inference, not evidence, and the honest position is that the date is published three ways and none of the three is obviously wrong.

What is not in dispute is that plenty of Provo never converted. "Heaps Brick Oven" remains in circulation, and the restaurant's own website acknowledges it.

The delivery driver who bought the restaurant

The best-documented human in this story is not the founder.

Glee Zumbrennen started working at Heaps in 1958, delivering pizzas. In his own words, from a 1999 interview: "After about three or four years the owner wanted out." In 1962, Zumbrennen — an employee of four years — bought the restaurant.

That timeline squares with the other accounts: Kent Heaps sold in the early 1960s, having introduced pizza to a town that did not know what it was and then handed it to his delivery driver.

What Zumbrennen built is measurable in seats:

• Early years: roughly 75 seats — folding chairs and a few booths.
• By 1970: 236 seats, remodelled into a proper family-style restaurant. Upholstered booths replaced the folding chairs. This is the same moment the name changed.
• 1985: expanded to 419 seats.

A restaurant that seats over four hundred people in Provo is a piece of civic infrastructure, and it explains why Brick Oven is the reflexive answer for any group of more than eight in this town.

The house method, per the 2002 case study, was unglamorous and repeated verbatim by the operator today: attention to detail, moderate prices, friendly service, cleanliness, and good pizza. There is no reinvention in the story. Seventy years of doing the same thing is the story.

What the corner used to be

This is the detail nobody else prints, and it is the best thing about the restaurant's history.

Brick Oven's growth since 1956 has consumed, on the corner of 150 East and 800 North:

• Stadium Lunch (the original cafe)
• Durfey Cleaners
• Stadium Market
• Campus Barber Shop
• four houses

Managers have described longtime customers coming in who remember getting a haircut on that corner and then getting a pizza afterwards — two errands that are now one building.

(Today's street address is 111 East 800 North; the historical accounts describe the growth in terms of the 150 East corner. Same block, different reference points, seventy years apart.)

The root beer

If you ask someone who left Provo what they miss about Brick Oven, a large share will say the root beer before they say the pizza.

It has been made in house since 1956 — the operator dates it to the founding, not to some later revival — and it is sold by the mug and, historically, by the gallon. There is an apple beer as well. Neither is alcoholic; this is Utah, and "beer" here has meant a house-brewed soda for seventy years.

The other cult item is the "Green" Ranch dressing, which the restaurant markets by name and which has a devoted following out of all proportion to a salad dressing.

What to order now

The pizza is the reason to come, and the honest framing is the one our pizza guide uses: this is not the most refined pizza in Provo, and it does not need to be. It is generous, reliable, unchanged, and served in a room built for families.

The classic order is a combination pizza and a mug of root beer. The specialty pizzas have historically carried names that gesture back at the old identity — a deluxe "heaps a pizza" among them — and the current menu also runs a Romano crust version.

The bars are the underrated half of the operation and the reason the restaurant works for a mixed group: a salad bar, a soup bar and a pasta bar, which between them will feed a picky eight-year-old, a vegetarian and someone who does not want pizza, without anyone having to negotiate.

Beyond that, the kitchen runs a proper Italian-American menu — chicken parmesan, chicken fettuccine alfredo, rosemary chicken tortellini, a gourmet grinder sandwich — plus the desserts, of which the chocolate mousse pie is the standing recommendation.

One practical note: the restaurant runs a rewards programme that includes a meaningful discount during your birthday month. For a family that eats here a few times a year anyway, it is free money.

⚠ A note on the ovens. A number of guides — including, until this page was written, several of ours — describe Brick Oven's pizza as wood-fired. The restaurant does not make that claim anywhere in its own materials, which are otherwise detailed about the history and the from-scratch cooking. The name refers to the oven, not to the fuel. We have removed the claim rather than repeating it, on the same principle applied elsewhere on this site: an unverifiable detail is dropped, not counter-asserted.

The student discount, described accurately

Brick Oven's student deal is one of the most-cited in Provo, and it is also one of the most consistently garbled.

The version you will read on a dozen apartment-marketing blogs is: 50% off a pizza with a student ID. Show the card, get half off.

The version reported by BYU's own student newspaper is more specific and more useful: Brick Oven runs a college loyalty programme you sign up for, using a valid student ID, and the card gives half-price pizza once a week. Not on demand at the till — a card you register for, with a weekly cadence.

Those are meaningfully different things at the counter, and the second one is the one that came from students actually using it. Terms on a decade-old loyalty scheme are exactly the sort of thing that quietly changes, so ask at the restaurant rather than arriving with a printout, and expect the real answer to be closer to a signup than a flash-the-card discount.

While we are on things published wrongly: at least one of those same student-discount blogs places Brick Oven on University Avenue. It is not, and never has been. It is on 800 North. Our student discounts guide covers the wider list of what is actually available in Provo.

Groups, catering and the private-party trade

A restaurant with several hundred seats near a university does a large share of its business in bookings, and Brick Oven leans into it. The operator markets private parties and catering directly — birthday parties, corporate functions, holiday parties and wedding festivities, which in Utah Valley means the rehearsal dinners, luncheons and open houses that surround a temple wedding rather than the reception itself.

That is a genuinely under-considered option. Our wedding budget guide makes the point that the surrounding events are where costs quietly multiply, and a pizza-and-pasta-bar catering order for a family lunch the day before is a considerably more sensible answer than a second catered dinner.

The practical mechanics: bookings and catering both go through the restaurant's own website rather than a third-party platform, and reservation requests have historically been declined for the Friday and Saturday 5 to 8 p.m. window — the peak the room cannot flex around. Plan a weekend group well ahead.

A note on the seventieth year

One small, slightly endearing detail. Brick Oven's own website currently headlines its history as "Over 50 Years of Brick Oven History."

That is true, in the way that a seventy-year-old is over fifty. But the restaurant held a sixtieth anniversary in 2016, complete with a remodel and a run of themed promotions through the year, which puts 2026 at seventy. The website copy appears to have been written somewhere in the fifties and never revisited — which is, honestly, the most Brick Oven thing about Brick Oven.

If there is an anniversary programme this year, it will be announced through the restaurant's own channels rather than the listings sites, and it is worth watching for: the sixtieth involved real promotions rather than a press release.

Getting there, and the game-day question

111 East 800 North, Provo, on the block south of campus. Published hours are Monday to Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., with no Sunday hours listed.

Brick Oven is a fixture of BYU football Saturdays, and it is worth being precise about where it sits, because guides routinely group it with the downtown restaurants. It is not a Center Street restaurant. Center Street is at 100 North; Brick Oven is at 800 North, seven blocks north of it and correspondingly closer to campus and to LaVell Edwards Stadium. If you are choosing between downtown and Brick Oven on a game day, you are choosing between two genuinely different parts of the city, not two restaurants on the same street.

Expect it to be full before and after a game. Our where to eat before a BYU game guide covers the timing; the short version is that ninety minutes before kickoff is not generous here.

For groups and private events, bookings go through the restaurant's own site rather than a reservations platform, and it has historically declined reservation requests for the Friday and Saturday 5 to 8 p.m. peak — so a large weekend group needs planning, and a Tuesday walk-in needs none.

What it is actually like inside

It is worth setting expectations, because "Provo institution since 1956" conjures a checked-tablecloth pizzeria and that is not what this is.

Brick Oven is large. Several hundred seats, multiple rooms, booths, and the constant low roar of a restaurant running near capacity. On a Friday evening in term time it is closer in feel to a busy family chain than to a neighbourhood pizzeria — except that the food is made in house and the building has been there since Eisenhower.

The service model is a hybrid that catches first-timers out: you order a pizza at the table, but the salad, soup and pasta bars are self-serve, which means a table can be eating within three minutes of sitting down while the pizza is still in the oven. That is the entire reason it works for children and for groups on a clock — nobody is sitting hungry.

The décor leans into the history without turning it into a museum. There is a plaque inside the front door making, in effect, the claim this whole page is about: that this corner has been the favourite hangout, first date, engagement dinner or family treat of most people in town.

A small piece of evidence for how far the reach goes. A visitor who lived in Provo in the mid-1980s while her husband was at BYU told BYU's student paper she ate her first Hawaiian pizza at Brick Oven — and that it was several years before pineapple on pizza reached her home state of Ohio. A restaurant in Utah was early to a national argument.

Why it lasted

Provo has lost a great many restaurants in seventy years, including several that were better. Brick Oven's survival comes down to something the 2016 director of operations put well when describing what the place is for: people come when they drop a missionary at the MTC, when they visit the temple, after BYU events, after games. It is where a family goes when the occasion is not about the food.

There is a running local legend that if you work at Brick Oven you will end up married — several employees have met their spouses there, Zumbrennen among them. Whether that is a statistical property of a Provo restaurant staffed by BYU students or a genuinely magic building is left as an exercise for the reader.

Seventy years in, the answer to what Brick Oven is has not changed: it is the tradition, and it is not chasing anything. Our history of the Provo food scene puts it in the context of the decades when it was one of the only bright spots in town — a period the current restaurant scene has thoroughly moved past, and which Brick Oven outlasted anyway.

Abigail Giordano

Senior Writer

Abigail Giordano is a senior writer at Provo.com covering student life, family resources, and community events across Utah Valley. Her writing focuses on making Provo more accessible and navigable for newcomers, students, and families — the practical guides that help people feel at home faster.