History

The Pizza D story is pretty simple. It started out with 2 college roommates, Mike and Greg, who shared a constant craving for pizza.

We were going to school in New Orleans, but both originally from New York. We bonded over a shared a passion for food; cooking it and talking about it. One of our favorite pastimes was complaining about our local pizza options.  Being from New York, one thing we had ingrained in us was a strong sense of what a good, honest, slice of pizza was. And we were not finding it. Couldn’t we do better?

For a long while, the idea of Pizza Delicious was just that, an occasional brainstorm. We were, after all, 2 liberal arts majors with no background in restaurants. Things changed when we were fortuitously introduced to an aging industrial bakery space, hiding on an otherwise all residential block in the Bywater. “The Kitchen”, as we called it, had an industrial dough mixer, a couple of deck ovens, and tons of character. It was pretty much everything we needed.

We began spending our Sundays teaching ourselves the craft of making pizza. Instead of old family recipes, we used the internet and our taste-buds.  After a couple of months of adjusting the hydration % on our dough recipe, we thought we had something. It was that combination of cheese (not too much), sauce (not too sweet) and crust (crispy, but still chewy) that reminded us of home. We were ready to share.

When we first opened our Sunday night only pop-up we had no business plan, or really any plan at all. There was just the aforementioned craving for pizza, a badass looking flier that our friend Bud had drawn, and a pay-as-you-go cell phone that had $10 on it. To order you would call the number on the flier and we would give you an address and a time. When you arrived you would walk down a small alley to an ad-hoc take out window. Customers routinely told us it reminded them of a drug deal.

Despite the unorthodox setup,  word began to spread. We, along with a wonderful small staff of our best friends, gradually went from making a handful of pizzas for curious neighbors, to selling over 100 pizzas every Sunday night. After about a year, we added Thursday nights as well. The community support was truly incredible and we are forever thankful to each customer who asked us when the ‘real’ restaurant was opening.

At that point, though, we had clearly outgrown our shared kitchen space and had started to look around for our permanent home. We found it in a big, empty warehouse only four blocks from the original kitchen. The location meant that we would be able to continue to feed our loyal customers, who built our business from nothing. The space though, was a long way from being a restaurant but after a long nine months of very confusing construction, we were ready to open!  On November 9, 2012, we served our first pie in our new restaurant. The rest is Delicious history….