Pizza Today - November 2017 - 71

I

n the Northwestern USA, residents are fanatical about enjoying
the beauty of the land and what
it affords. That includes great produce,
grapes for wine and more local beers
than you could possibly try in a lifetime.
At The Boiler Room Craft Pizza and
Swill, the goal was to combine great
food with a creative bar menu in a
full-service concept that blurs the line
between trendy upscale dining in a
family-friendly atmosphere.

"Our entire staff came from
corporate backgrounds," Hustad
says. When Goodwin and his team
formulated The Boiler Room, they
hired personalities first and foremost.
No one wears a uniform, and the people
who work there eat there as well.
In the first few months, they
concentrated on their concept,
determining what kind of experience

Owner Matt Goodwin helms
"a lot of night-life places

downtown, but he kind of wanted
to come unto his own and split off
and do a neighborhood concept,"
says General Manager Jory
Hustad, who has overseen the
restaurant's $1 million day-to-day
operations since its inception. "He
had the opportunity to build, and
he went to his designers and said
'hey, I just want to do something
that's lax, chill -- it's not a bar, but
it's not a full-on restaurant. What
can you do for me?'"
And from that came The Boiler
Room Craft Pizza and Swill in
December 2013. Goodwin "has
a niche for that neighborhood
feel. He doesn't like doing the big,
GENERAL MANAGER JORY HUSTAD
corporate stuff. He likes doing his
own ideas, keeping it small and keeping they wanted their customers to enjoy.
it local," Hustad says.
Within three or four months, right
Opening in a former grocery store,
about the time the weather cleared
Hustad said Goodwin immediately saw and the patio opened, "it just kind of
a need for a place where a family could
exploded," Hustad says. "We were nontake the kids and still have an upscale
stop busy for the rest of the year ... and
experience. The restaurant is surrounded we started to come into our own identity
by apartments, and sits at the foot
of being this kind of blue-collar family
of a wealthy enclave. With little
atmosphere, but if mom and dad needed
competition, the area afforded Goodwin to get away from the kids and have some
just the right amount of residents --
drinks and watch the game, they could.
and the right kind of patrons -- to help We're definitely not a sports bar, but
the concept succeed.
we can hit that if we need to, especially
when Gonzaga is playing basketball."

Hustad attributes the restaurant's
initial success to two key factors:
the quality of the product, which is
primarily pizza, and the people who
serve it. "Our servers do a phenomenal
job," Hustad says. "Our cooks put out
a product that I'd put up against pretty
much anything."
While formulating The Boiler
Room's pizza menu, the staff

ordered pizza from lots of local
places and looked for chinks in
the armor. What didn't those
places serve that The Boiler
Room could? What needs
weren't being met in the Spokane
marketplace?
The entire staff eventually
sat at the restaurant's large
community table, made
everything on the menu and took
candid, detailed notes. What
they came up with was "a menu
with your traditional style, your
pepperoni and cheeses, your
supremes and that type of thing,
and then we took a spin on it
and made it our own," Hustad
says. "Everything's made inhouse, so it was easy for us to
do. Everything's hand cut, hand
tossed." Sixty percent of sales is
food based, and the bar accounts
for roughly 40 percent. Pizza accounts
for 60 percent of food sales.
At first, the menu consisted simply of
appetizers dubbed "Sharables" (iconic
housemade pretzels at $9 are a favorite),
salad and pizza. "We didn't have
anything else," Hustad says.
As the staff grew more experienced
and bolder with the wood-burning
oven, so too did the menu. Through
cross utilization, the pizza menu now
covers everything from the Pesto Pie
(a house cheese blend, marinated
artichoke hearts, red onions, sweet

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Pizza Today - November 2017

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