pizza-ria, offering award winning NY style (thin-crust) pizza by the slice or by the pie. Located in Chicago, pizza-ria offers fast chicago pizza delivery with high-qaulity ingredients. Order your slice TODAY!
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CHICAGO SUNTIMES ARTICLE:
As Jeremy Green tells it, his partner in pizza peddling, Tom Fornarelli, decided to open a shop in the South Loop in 2003 when he couldn't find any good pizza in the city.
Come again?
"Thin crust. He couldn't find any good thin crust pizza," Green said.
OK.
Their new Pizza-Ria -- actually a reincarnation of Fornarelli's Got Pizza restaurant that was popular with a college crowd before he sold it -- is thinking small to grow big in an independent market dominated by the heftier Chicago style of pizza. They're going thin with the crust, and focusing on selling by the slice -- even delivering slices.
It's playing in a U.S. pizza market that grew 3.4 percent to $27.7 billion in 2005, trailing the overall restaurant industry, according to Chicago-based Technomic Information Services.
Pizza-Ria has eight stores and three delivery-only outposts. It's in the process of adding another six stores and is filing with the state to franchise the business. The plan is to open another 24 locations within the next 18 moths.
A Bronzeville store opened last spring and stores in Arlington Heights and Berwyn that opened last summer are operated through joint partnerships.
Working in pizza shops since he was 10, Fornarelli, 36, had run a Pizza Cucina outlet in his hometown of Melrose Park before he and his wife, Danielle, 25, launched the Got Pizza store at 719 S. State. That shop took off and attracted the attention of Florida-based Blue Moon Group Inc., which saw in the restaurant an opportunity to build on a cafe concept a la Starbucks to promote CDs from its hip-hop and club music labels. Blue Moon bought the store and kept Fornarelli on as a consultant to help expand Got Pizza to three other locations.
Displeased with what he saw as the company's reduced focus on food quality, Fornarelli in September 2005 teamed with Green to buy the pizza business back from Blue Moon.
"We saw where they were going wrong," said Green, 27, who had joined Blue Moon's corporate finance unit earlier that year. "They were just focusing on the wrong things."
For one, Fornarelli said, Got Pizza was moving away from a food focus.
"After seeing what they were doing to my chain, I just couldn't take it," Fornarelli said. "They were changing the product. . . . I wasn't willing to jeopardize my recipes with lesser ingredients."
Green and the Fornarellis axed the CD sales and moved some stores to higher-traffic areas to attract walk-in business.
They put about $100,000 into branding and marketing and expanded the number of types of pizza available by the slice to about 10.
"We felt that was part of our competitive advantage over other places," Florida-bred Green said, adding the chain added pizza varietiand grilled chicken wings and nuggets to the menu.
A parent company, Pizza-Ria Financial, actually handles the overhead and leases employees to the stores.
The original State Street store, which still bears Got Pizza signage, has remained one of the chain's strongest locations, joined at the top by new shops in Wrigleyville and at the CTA Red Line's North & Clybourn station that offers commuters, employees of nearby businesses and barflies the chance to grab a slice of pizza inside of 90 seconds.
The company spent $250,000 getting the 650-square-foot L station space into shape, installing special machines that have limited susceptibility to train vibrations. That spot, which does a particularly brisk business when nearby bars close, is also one of the stores that led it to focus on delivery of slices last summer.
Still, operating New York-style pizza joints in the Windy City has the team fielding questions about their business choice.
"You eat Chicago-style pizza and you need to go lay down on the couch," Fornarelli said, adding that putting away a slice of New York style is less likely to hamper activity. "You can go to work. You can have sex. You can do anything you want."
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