Grace Mancy is proud to be the first woman in her family, which has been in the business for four generations, to run her own restaurant. | J. Adrian Wylie

The most recognizable name in the Toledo fine dining scene has long been Mancy’s. Their flagship steakhouse began in 1921 as a twenty-four-hour diner serving factory shift workers and families. In recent years, the Mancy Restaurant Group added seafood, Italian, and roadhouse establishments as well.

John Mancy, one of five third-generation restauranteur brothers, and his wife Gabrielle, a New Jersey native, wanted to expand with a pizza bar specializing in the New York style.

“I went to my brothers and said, ‘I got this great idea about a pizzeria,’ and they said, ‘Not interested.’ And I said, ‘Can I do it anyways?’ They said yes,” he relates.

So in 2018 they branched off with The Stubborn Brother Pizza Bar on Bancroft St. near the University of Toledo, with their son Andrew as managing partner. The thin-crust pies start with unbleached organic flour, water filtered with a New York WaterMaker system, and a five-day fermentation process.

Media personality and provocateur Dave Portnoy, a 1999 U-M grad, called it “the best college campus pizza I’ve ever had” in a 2022 YouTube video with over 448,000 views.

“We sold out of pizzas for three weeks straight until we could actually make enough back stock,” says daughter Grace Mancy, twenty-six, whose career started at age fourteen in the Mancy’s Steakhouse coatroom. “Two years after he came, in 2024 we expanded our restaurant to another 125 seats. As he tripled our restaurant sales, it never dropped off.”

So their next expansion, the first of many they hope to launch in Big Ten cities, is into 6,000 square feet on the ground floor of the Standard apartments, about a mile north of the Big House. 

It’s now Grace’s place to serve as general manager and earn an ownership stake. While the dough will make regular trips up US-23 in a refrigerated truck, she’s already moved downtown for the build-out and assembly of what she expects to be a 100-person team.

“The amount of times I’ve been called at 7 a.m. to get over to the restaurant to make a decision has been more than two hands,” she says.

Dine-in customers enter from S. Main for booth, table, or bar seating, while carry-out patrons use the door on E. William. By-the-slice lunch specials run daily in combination with a drink and optional salad.

Sit-down diners can order whole eighteen-inch pies or individual slices. Sicilian-style and cauliflower crusts are also available, along with a slate of appetizers, salads, subs, strombolis, and desserts. Beverages include canned and draft beer, wines on draft or by the bottle, and “all the basic cocktails,” says Grace, a tequila fan herself.

Like many of the Mancys, she went away for a time before rejoining the family business, playing Division I soccer for the University of South Dakota and working as a chamber of commerce event coordinator.

While giving due props to her mother’s role in starting the Stubborn Brother brand, she’s also proud to be the first woman in the Mancy line to run her own restaurant. 

Its core values—stubbornly fresh, stubbornly clean, stubbornly honest—“carried over to the fourth generation,” Grace says. “It’s the way that we want to treat our guests, the way we want to treat our staff. We are going to continue to do it our way because it works.”

The Stubborn Brother Pizza Bar, 405 S. Main, unit A. (734) 356–4086. Daily 11 a.m.–TBA. stubbornbrother.com

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