Pizza Today - April 2017 - 58

Near the end of the pop-up run,
Pizza Delicious was selling 120 pizzas
every time it opened.
"It was exciting," recalls Friedman. "It
eventually got to where you had to call
really early in the night to reserve your
pizza in advance, because we only had so
much dough. Once it was gone, it was
gone. We were getting phone calls at 10
a.m., and we didn't open until 5. People
would call at 10 and go, 'Are you sold
out yet?' We eventually hired a friend to
take phone calls throughout the day and
pencil in the pizza reservations. By the
time we opened at 5 p.m., if you wanted
to get a pizza the wait was three to four
hours long. That's when we realized we
needed to open a restaurant."

out about this makeshift alleyway pizza
joint that was serving really good food.
Before long, says Augarten, "it just
snowballed. We developed a following."
Eating pizza is one thing. Making

it is another animal entirely. Where'd
these two New York kids who attended
Tulane learn how to make it?
"We're self taught," Augarten says.
"We just messed around and researched
methods and recipes on the Internet."
Adds Friedman: "We knew what we
wanted it to taste like, because we'd
grown up on it. It was just a matter of
figuring out how to make it like we
wanted it to taste."
The hardest part? The dough, of
course.
"We didn't experiment that much
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with dough before we got to the
commercial kitchen," Augarten says.
"But to really understand how the
dough will react, we had to work with
big batches. That was the biggest
learning curve for us. We aren't bakers.
But we knew if we could figure the
dough out that everything else would
seem easier. We were in there four to six
weeks before we started selling pizza."
After a year, Pizza Delicious began
operating out of the space on Thursday
nights as well in order to satisfy
demand. Customers routinely asked
when "the real pizzeria" would open so
that they wouldn't have to wait so long
to get their fix.
"But two nights a week was the most
we could use the space because there were
other people in there," Friedman says.

They made the jump from pizza
eaters to pizza makers. Why couldn't
they make the leap from pop-up
stars to brick-and-mortar, full-time
restaurateurs?
"That was never the idea," cautions
Friedman. "This came out of a lot of
repetitive conversations that Greg and
I would have towards the end of school.
I can't believe no one had done it yet. I
couldn't believe that this city had such
great, amazing food everywhere, but
the pizza sucked. We knew if anyone
ever figured it out that they'd do well.
Not that we had it all figured out - we
aren't business guys.
"But we didn't intend to open a
restaurant until much later on, when
we saw the demand and finally realized
that, yes, we could do this. That's when
we really started to address, step by step,
what it meant to make people happy
on a consistent basis and how to make
good food on a consistent basis. And
how to make more of it. We had maxed
out that space we were in."
Staying in Bywater, where the
groundswell began, just made sense
when it came time to search out a
storefront.
"There were a lot of people living
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