Last year, South Lake Union’s Pizza by Ruffin and Métier Brewing Company teamed up for a “First of the First” dinner, featuring—per Pizza by Ruffin’s Instagram—the first Black-owned brewery and the first Black-owned pizzeria in the state.

Only they weren’t.

The pizzeria from Isaiah Ruffin and Colleen Constant has been making the pioneering claim since it opened in October 2024. As I updated our list of Black-owned restaurants earlier this year, two things stood out to me. The first, a quote from Rodney Hines, the owner of Métier Brewing Company, in which he says he isn’t entirely comfortable describing his business as Washington’s first Black-owned brewery: “We have a horrible history of not telling everyone’s story, right?” The second was the entry for Goldie’s and the Roost, the Whidbey Island pizzeria co-owned by former Delancey chef Sedrick Livingston, which opened in June 2024.

I wouldn’t—and didn’t—set out to correct a claim because of a few months’ difference in opening date. Restaurants are small businesses, meaning owners wear 10,000 hats, and marketing is only a small piece of it. I’d noticed the error when Pizza by Ruffin first opened and figured they made a mistake. Yet, a year and a half later, the false claim persists—despite Ruffin and Constant themselves phasing it out—parroted often by media, both social and traditional.

“Because of the, to turn a phrase, media blackout on Black history, there are these stories that we hear, and we really want them to be true,” says Adrian Miller, the James Beard Award–winning author known as the Soul Food Scholar. “There are a lot of incredible stories that have been forgotten over time.”

I couldn’t kick the nagging feeling that where there’s smoke, there’s fire—and specifically the fire in the ovens of many more forgotten Black pizzeria owners. I began digging into digital archives. I found Island Pizzeria, a Jamaican spot that closed in Tacoma a decade ago; Jed’s Big Slice, a truck that has roamed Tacoma since 2022; and Pizza Addict, which operated in Renton and Des Moines from 2016 until 2023. Then I landed on the story of Eartha Mae Brooks, owner of Mrs. Pizza Express.

“Often, the journey to the truth is revealing in and of itself,” Miller says. “You can get to the truth, but along the way, you’ll just find out other stuff.”

In the fall of 1990, Domino’s Pizza declared it wouldn’t deliver to the Central District. At the time, a quarter of Seattle’s Black residents lived there, making up about half the neighborhood’s population. By 1996, Pizza Hut had 80 areas of Western Washington to which it refused to deliver, a practice called “pizza redlining.” The chains cited crime statistics; residents called it racism.

While pizza delivery robberies were a real issue, they didn’t scare off Brooks, a 57-year-old retired teacher from the East Coast who opened her pizzeria at 29th and East Cherry in 1996. In the heart of the Central District, open from 11am to 2am, Mrs. Pizza Express sold hand-tossed New York–style pizzas in three sizes, each with the choice of two toppings—and free delivery.

Brooks dreamed big for her little pizza shop: In 1997, she spoke out in Olympia to support a tax allowing Seattle to keep its NFL team and fund a new stadium—what’s now Lumen Field, home to the Super Bowl LX champion Seattle Seahawks. She testified alongside Bob Whitsitt and Damon Huard, as related by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “‘If we could be in the new stadium,’ said Brooks, fantasizing about the possibility of her tiny, inner-city delivery operation competing in the pizza big leagues. ‘If we could really be there, then say goodbye to Pizza Hut, say goodbye to Domino’s, and say hello to Mrs. Pizza.’”

In 2000, Mrs. Pizza said hello to two big contracts. One with the company building the new stadium, allowing her to operate a trailer at the construction site to feed the workers and others in the neighborhood. The other, with then-new then-Safeco Field to sell pizzas at Mariners games.

When baseball season began, she found that racism in the pizza world followed her down the hill. Her contract was to supply 2,000 pizzas per game, at $1.13 per pie. Three months later, the management company supplied frozen pizzas they wanted her to sell, for which they paid her a rate of $0.08 each. She accused the company of discriminating against her employees and targeting them for mistrust, “Based primarily, if not solely, on their language, culture or skin color,” per the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Brooks’s suit against the company never made it anywhere, with the last of it ruled beyond the statute of limitations in 2007. By the time she passed away in 2015 at the age of 76, her legacy as Mrs. Pizza had already nearly disappeared. Only by virtue of her fight for the Seahawks, for a stadium, and then against a (different) stadium, does her name live on in the newspaper archives.

“One of the things that I’ve discovered in my journey is there was just a lot of stuff that I didn’t know,” Miller says. Uncovering Brooks’s lost story only demonstrated the same to me: There may well have been 10 other Mrs. Pizza Expresses that never made enough news to live on into the digital era.

Their (potential) existence takes nothing away from Pizza by Ruffin—which is, as far as I know, the only Black-owned pizza restaurant in Seattle right now. In recent months, Ruffin and Constant heard from people on social media about other Black-owned pizzerias and stopped making the claim. Opening what he thought was Washington’s first Black-owned pizzeria filled Isaiah Ruffin with pride, joy, and a sense of inclusion, and he says learning of the places that came before does nothing to change that.

Pizza is a very white industry, and Ruffin still sees evidence of that often when customers come in and see his Roman-style pies infused with the flavors of the Black diaspora—Ethiopian doro wat, Somali lamb, and jerk chicken—and say, “Why would you put that on pizza? That don’t belong on pizza!”

Others ask him why he insists on calling out Black ownership. “To show we’re out here,” he says. To show what he and the few other Black pizzeria owners around the country do. “That we’re just as capable of bringing our flair and flavors to the table.” That there are still so few underlines the importance of highlighting those breaking that mold—alongside the stories of those who came before.

I now find myself glad that Pizza by Ruffin made the incorrect claim. As someone who grew up in Seattle and went to school in the Central District, I knew in my bones that Pizza by Ruffin wasn’t the first Black-owned pizzeria in Washington. It had bugged me that a year after moving to the state, using only Google search, they had latched onto it.

But also, without that claim, I would never have gone down the internet rabbit hole of Washington’s previous Black-owned pizza restaurants. Without that claim, I never would have learned about Mrs. Pizza Express, nor had the opportunity to tell everyone else about it. My annoyance at the claim came from how it erased those who came before, but in the end, it did the opposite, giving the world another chance to hear the fascinating story of Eartha Mae Brooks and reminding us of Seattle’s many shades of pizza history—from redlined to Black-owned.