Chipotle opened its second fast-casual gourmet pizzeria on Sunday in West Highland, Denver after the success of the first one launched in December
Businessmen Bobby Stuckey and Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson collaborated with Chipotle to bring Pizzeria Locale in Denver. The fast-casual pizza restaurant specializes in customized personal pies, where customers can choose their own toppings from a service line of high-quality ingredients. The pizzeria also offers eight classic and four American pizzas in the menu.
"Pizzeria Locale is growing faster than Chipotle did in the early days," Steve Ells, one of Chipotle's chief executive, said to Bloomberg TV. Ells said that collaborating with the Frasca founders said that they managed to bring the concept that made Chipotle popular into creating an "extraordinary pizza, made with high-quality ingredients accessible to everyone."
The idea for Pizzeria Locale originated from the business duo's Frasca Food and Wine, a Naples, Italy-inspired contemporary pizzeria. It's also modeled itself after Chipotle in which diners can also choose which ingredients they want included in their burrito. The pizzas are baked in high temperature in an oven specially built for the fast-casual restaurant. It's designed to bake the pizza in two minutes without having the impression that it's a microwaved pizza.
For the opening of the second pizzeria, Stuckey and Mackinnon-Pattreson will be making their own flour for their pizza, grinding the wheat in a mill custom-made in Austria. They're introducing the first-of-its-kind dough recipe that uses a special flour combined with water, salt, and starter that's slow-fermented to achieve a flavorful dough.
Stuckey said that they don't treat Pizzeria Locale different from Frasca. The raw ingredients used in the pizza may be expensive, but a stone-ground pizza only comes at $5.75, and a few bucks more depending on additional toppings.
The first Pizzeria Locale in Broadway will get its own mill in the coming months, and future stores will also offer the new specialized flour.
