Around 6:30 on a Thursday, Ron Penfold is leaning against the counter at Ha Ha Pizza in Yellow Springs doing what he has done most evenings since the early nineties: watching the door. He knows when the regulars are overdue. He can tell from a party’s body language whether they want menus or whether they already know what they want, which is usually the same thing they ordered last time.
Ha Ha Pizza has been on Xenia Avenue in Yellow Springs since 1975, which makes it older than a solid third of its current customer base. It sits in a building that has the comfortable disorganization of a place that never bothered to reimagine itself, and that restraint has served it well. The walls accumulate art and notices and stickers in the way that only genuinely well-attended spots do — not curated clutter, just actual accumulation.
Ron started here as a favor to a friend and ended up staying. He finds this neither remarkable nor especially worth dramatizing. “People like pizza,” he will tell you, as if that explains the full arc of his career, and in a way it does. He has watched Yellow Springs cycle through its various phases — the artists, the activists, the Antioch boom years, the Antioch crisis years, the slow rebound — and Ha Ha has sat through all of it, sending out pies.
The pizza itself is worth talking about separately from Ron’s tenure. The crust is thick but not bready, with enough chew to hold up under substantial toppings without turning into a structural engineering problem. They use a generous hand with cheese. The sauce is straightforward — tomato, not sweet, not fussy. The menu runs to classics: sausage, pepperoni, veggie combinations. There is no molecular gastronomy happening here and no one is pretending otherwise.
A large cheese runs around fifteen dollars. Add toppings and you are still probably under twenty-five for a pie that feeds two adults comfortably. They also do calzones and salads, though asking Ron what he recommends will result in a look that suggests you already know the answer.
Yellow Springs is about twenty minutes east of Dayton on US-68, which means Ha Ha draws from both the village locals and a steady stream of people making the drive specifically. On weekend evenings the wait for a table can stretch — the room is not large — so either arrive early or accept that you will stand in the small entry for a while, which is itself not unpleasant. The staff are unhurried in a way that reads as confidence rather than indifference.
What Ron seems to appreciate most about the place, on the occasions when he discusses it at all, is the consistency. Same dough recipe, same ovens, same general rhythm. In a profession built on attrition, that kind of stability registers as an accomplishment. He will not say that. He will just refill your water and ask if you need anything else.
Ha Ha Pizza is closed on Tuesdays. Everything else is negotiable.
