Home > Blogs > Taste: Dayton food and restaurants > Archives > 2012 > January > 31 > Entry
Three decades later, London Bobby Fish & Chips revived in Kettering
KETTERING — What’s old is new again: Cassano’s Pizza King has brought London Bobby Fish & Chips back to the Dayton area, about 30 years after the last London Bobby restaurant closed.
The London Bobby Fish & Chips menu was added to the Cassano’s Pizza King restaurant menu at 1680 E. Stroop Road. The headquarters and commissary of the 33-store Cassano’s pizza chain are housed in an adjacent building.
The first of the second-generation London Bobby restaurants opened in Trenton in late 2010, also in an existing Cassano’s. If the newly offered fish and chips menu goes over well, it will show up at a handful of other Cassano’s locations in the Miami Valley, perhaps later this year, according to Chris Cassano, president of Cassano’s Pizza King and part of the third generation of the Cassano family now operating the local chain.
Cassano’s founder Vic Cassano launched the London Bobby Fish & Chips chain in the 1970s and operated several free-standing stores in the Dayton area until the early 1980s. Chris Cassano said he and his siblings — company CEO Vic “Chip” Cassano III and Lora Cassano Hammons, the company’s director of community relations — wanted to bring back one of their grandfather’s other restaurant concepts. The response has been encouraging, and several customers remember the previous incarnation of London Bobby, he said.
Additional expansion will occur within existing pizza stores; there are no current plans for free-standing London Bobby locations, Cassano said. That will keep the costs of expanding the London Bobby brand down, since the overhead and employees are already in place in the pizza restaurants, he said.
The London Bobby locations offer beer-battered fish, shrimp and chicken, with sides of fries, hush puppies, onion rings and creamy cole slaw.
Cassano’s Pizza King began in Dayton in 1953. Two months ago, it opened a new restaurant in Centerville, the decor of which will serve as a model for upcoming renovations of existing stores, Cassano said.
The Kettering restaurant’s hours are 10 a.m. to midnight Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday, and 10:30 a.m. to midnight Sunday. To place an order, call the Cassano’s call center at (937) 294-5464.
TweetGo to my facebook page and click Like to comment.
