Boom’s Pizza opened its new Solon shop on Thursday, Oct. 22, at 4 p.m., at 6130 Kruse Drive. The opening marks a first for the Northeast Ohio pizza business: this location is built only for carryout and delivery, with no dining room for customers to sit down and eat inside.
The Solon shop also has no liquor license, another break from a traditional sit-down pizzeria. Chef Ben Bebenroth, who founded Boom’s, described the format plainly ahead of the opening. “It will be our first carryout and delivery-only shop – no dining room,” Bebenroth said, setting out a model focused entirely on getting pizzas to customers to take home.
Customers in Solon will otherwise find the same operation they would at the company’s sister shops. Boom’s said the new location offers the same menu, the same food and the same service as its other stores, even though the building itself is set up differently. The change is in how orders are handled, not in what is being served.
The biggest change inside is capacity. The Solon kitchen was built with double oven capacity compared with the other shops, a step Boom’s expects to greatly reduce wait times. For a carryout and delivery business, where every order depends on oven space during busy dinner hours, that added capacity is central to how the new shop is meant to work.
Bebenroth opened the first Boom’s Pizza in Lakewood in 2023. The business has grown from that original shop in a short period, building a following on the west side before expanding east with larger quarters and, now, with a format designed specifically for takeout orders.
After Lakewood, Bebenroth added a flagship location at the Van Aken District in Shaker Heights, along with a slice stand in the Market Hall there. Those openings gave Boom’s both a full flagship presence and a smaller stand serving shoppers, and they set up the move into Solon as the next step in the company’s growth across the Cleveland area.
For Solon customers, the new shop brings that menu closer to home, with an operation designed around shorter waits for pickup and delivery instead of a meal in a dining room. Boom’s growth is not stopping there, either: a new pizzeria is also in the works in the Avon Commons Shopping Center, expected to open in the coming months.
Photo: Dale Cruse, CC BY