Pizza Today - April 2017 - 64

friendly. We wanted to fill part of that
niche."
The pizzas at Five Points could be categorized as New York-style - large pies
cut into foldable slices. The style satisfies
the needs of families and hungry solo
diners equally well.
"Tara and I both lived (in New York)
for a while," says Tieman. "And, in the
end, it just seemed like the natural choice
in terms of style. Our pies are big, our
slices are big, and our ingredients are the
freshest possible. We really try to straddle

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the line of not being too fancy, but keeping the menu creative enough to keep our
customers happy. Our pizza menu kind
of crosses the spectrum from basic pies to
some pretty complicated builds, such as our
habañero cream sauce pie. Hopefully, we've
been able to offer our customers as many
options as possible, with a relatively limited
number of ingredients. We also have a few
really great culinary minds in our shop, so
we let them get creative from time to time.
We do a 'Farmer's Market' pie every week,
and we let our pizza guys come up with the
slice pies every day. Really, though, our aim
is just to be a typical NY-style pizza shop."
To that end, Five Points eschews a longer menu for a streamlined lineup. Simply
put, it allows for better execution.
"We're really just a one trick pony, and
that's been intentional since day one," Tieman contends. "No sandwiches, no pasta,
no wings ... Just pizza. And we did as
much research on it as possible, especially
on dough and dough making. I think that
was the hardest part for us to master. All
our dough is aged a minimum of 48 hours,

and it took some practice to dial it in. We
also got a lot of advice at the Pizza Expo
the year before we opened. We went to
the seminars, talked with folks like Tom
Lehmann and got some good advice from
our pizza heroes like Phil Korshack from
Home Slice in Austin. We listened to what
people were telling us not to do more than
anything, and it really paid off. When we
had some basic ideas on who we wanted to
be in the industry, we headed up to Staten
Island for pizza school with the guys at
Goodfella's. That was our first time in a
commercial kitchen getting to test out all
our menu items. They were really helpful on
so many levels."
One of the great things about the
industry is that, just like the Five Points
neighborhood, the pizza tribe always
stands ready to help one another out.
Tieman says he received plenty of menu
development and design advice.
"As to menu design, we got a whole lot
of help there too. And we learned from
a lot of people smarter than us to avoid
ingredients that can only be used on one
menu item," he says. "Keeping product
moving through the store as fast as possible is the best way to keep the freshest
items on the table and avoid potential
waste. We've also benefited from the
principle that it's better to do one thing
great than many things just okay. I also
think our professional backgrounds helped
us come up with a good pricing model."
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