A slice of passion: How SLC’s pop-up pizza makers are changing the city’s food culture

Teresa Heroux had battled against some 200 others five days before to get here.

Even before that fight began, she had been scheming. “I’ve been an online stalker for like three weeks,” Heroux said, “just waiting.”

On a Tuesday, all that effort paid off. The pizza, for which she had outcompeted hundreds of people, sat between her and her husband, David Francis, on a round metal sheet pan. Two types of pepperoni, shishito peppers, finished with olive oil, basil, oregano and stracciatella and grana padano cheese — made by one of Salt Lake City’s most-popular pizza purveyors, Sam Pew, at his now-ironically named Secret Pizza Club.

Heroux and Francis, who call themselves aspiring foodies, loved it.

Part of this pizza’s allure, they admitted, was the thrill of the chase, of trying to get one in their virtual cart before hundreds of others got theirs first. But, after trying a few slices, the couple learned all the fervor wasn’t just hype. This pizza is good enough to fight for. She raved about its sesame seed crust and the creamy dipping sauce that accompanied the order.

It’s better, Heroux said, than any she’s eaten at the ubiquitous pizza shops in New York City or Chicago.

“This,” she said,” is a passion pizza.”

Each week Pew and his skeleton crew — sous chef Nick Garcia and Dave Nelson, who runs the front-of-house — push out about 100 pizzas in two drops, typically on Sundays and Tuesdays, from Leavity Bread & Coffee.

His pizzas have gotten increasingly popular — and hard to nab — since Pew started the not-so-secret club about three years ago, when the pies he was selling out of his home started to attract crowds in numbers that concerned his landlord. A recent visit from Barstool Sports president David Portnoy, known for his one-bite pizza reviews, has attracted even more interest in Pew’s pizza.

But Pew isn’t the only pop-up pizza game in town. One Eyed Dog Pizza, a passion project of local chef Brady Houmand and baker Becca Shapiro, named for their dog Stevie, has been selling out of its Chicago tavern-style pizzas in irregular drops over the last year.

Baby’s Bagels, too, has started making the other round East Coast food staple, transforming its unobtrusive downtown bagel shop into a pizza parlor three days a week. And new chefs, like Marcus Chen of Priscilla’s Pizza, are carving out a spot for themselves in the growing scene, that eschews expensive brick and mortar, for the moment anyway, for the freedom to play around with ingredients and build out skills and a following.

In interviews with The Salt Lake Tribune, these pizza purveyors were often hesitant to say that their pizza was filling a need in a city that has a less-than-stellar pizza reputation. But years of online discourse makes that point for them. It was, after all, a Salt Lake City pizza chain that Michael Jordan said sickened him ahead of his dominating “flu game” performance against the Jazz in the 1997 NBA Finals.

Their patrons, however, weren’t as shy.

Jesse Breinholt, who spoke with The Tribune after finishing slices at Baby’s Bagels on a recent Wednesday, lamented Salt Lake City’s sparse pizza scene after being exposed to the riches in Chicago.

“You can stop at any pizza place [in Chicago], and you can get any kind of pizza you want, and it’s all good,” he said, “and you come back here and we have, like, one good pizza place.” He prefers the Pie Hole.

In his quest for better pizza, Breinholt said he’s tried Baby’s Bagels and Pew’s Secret Pizza Club.

“This is more my style. Sam’s is really good, really good. I think that this is like a New Haven-style, like the real char. I like New York-style,” he conceded, “but this is killer, too.”

Regardless of their opinions on the existing pizza options, these chefs say they believe they are filling a need — bringing high-quality, region-specific styles of pizza to a city that hasn’t yet reached a critical mass of such establishments, and doing so in a way they hope makes the city better and builds community along the way.

A well-balanced pizza scene

Outside Baby’s Bagels on a recent Wednesday, Ash Puzey and Isa Empey had cleared about half of an 18-inch pie. Puzey’s paper plate was empty, save for a folded square of crust, bits of char and a discarded plastic fork.

This was the pair’s third time having Baby’s Bagels’ pizza as they searched for their one “go-to pizza place,” Empey said. A trip to New York showed them “real pizza” and, Puzey added, “ruined” them.

They do like some Salt Lake City joints, like Pizza Nono in the 9th and 9th neighborhood. And Pie Hole, downtown, sometimes “hits the spot,” Puzey said.

But it’s not enough. They decried other options, like The Pie, a classic University of Utah haunt, for its extreme cheesiness. And ordering from national chains, like Domino’s, feels impersonal.

“That’s why we’re looking at the pop-ups,” Puzey said.

Eric Valchuis, one of Baby’s Bagels owners, said their end-of-week pizza transformation that Puzey and Empey now enjoy was fueled by the same force that caused them to open a bagel shop: East Coast nostalgia.

Valchuis and his co-owners, brothers Koby and Cyrus Elias, all grew up outside of Boston and have fond memories of their local, “humble” pizza shops. He said that Salt Lake City’s pizza scene is not yet “amazing,” but that it has gotten better, with some “really good” options, especially for Neapolitan-style pizzas.

Baby’s Bagels, he said, is “just rounding out the pizza offerings.”

Indeed, Valchuis said their passion for pizza was just as strong as their passion for bagels, but it was easier to get started selling bagels online from their origins in a shared kitchen in South Salt Lake.

For one thing, bagels have a longer shelf life than pizza. “You want [pizza] directly out of the oven,” Valchuis said.

With pizza on the menu, Valchuis said Baby’s’ owners are fulfilling a dream they’ve had since opening — and people seem to like it. They expanded a little over a month ago from just one day a week, on Wednesdays, to Thursdays and Fridays, too, writing in an Instagram post, “You guys have been showing UP for pizza nights.”

The transition from daytime business to dinner service wasn’t without snags, and it’s taken some work to make the bagel shop work for pizza. For instance, Valchuis said early on they sold larger pies, which were too big for the shop’s smaller booths.

Valchuis said “we’re still just trying to figure out what works, what doesn’t, throwing stuff against the wall.”

Even what exactly the pizza operation is called is a bit in flux. For a moment, they were Pie Boys Pizza, but Valchuis said they’ve since started going by Baby’s Pizza. That seems to be where they’ll land.

The ad hoc nature of these events also fosters a spirit of curiosity and creativity, one that might be dulled if owners were more concerned about running a pizza shop full-time, where one would need to pay up front — both for the space and the ovens and other equipment.

Pew leases space at Leavity for his operation, which has so far been a good deal for him and the bakery’s owner Todd Bradley. Pew gets to use Leavity’s copious space, ovens and notoriously pricey vent hood, while the sublease helps Bradley with his business’s bills.

Pew’s pizza, Bradley said, is labor of love in an expensive market. People like Pew, he said, “put everything that they have into what they love doing.”

Hype is real — and growing?

Pew has a morbid joke about selling pizza — that it’s a lot like selling drugs: “It kind of sells itself.”

Pew’s more recent drops have attracted hundreds of people for pre-sales. The secret has been out for a while and Portnoy’s recent visit spread the hype further. That’s why he didn’t post too much about Portnoy’s visit, Pew explained Monday at Leavity as he prepped for the Tuesday pizza drop.

With so many already upset when they don’t win the pizza lottery, he said, “I’m not going to keep driving this train and making more and more people angry.”

So, in addition to learning how to best distribute pizza, there’s also some amount of hype-management involved in the pop-up business, Pew and Valchuis each said.

How do you get people excited about the pizza so that they come, but that you don’t attract so many people that you sell out and people are left disappointed?

One Wednesday early in Baby’s Bagels’ pizza journey, the bagel shop partnered with One Eyed Dog Pizza to sell their tavern-style pizza.

The store opened at 5 p.m. and sold out in about 30 minutes. Disappointed would-be patrons, who’d already been turned around, warned others walking up to start thinking about other dinner plans — one that didn’t include bite-sized square slices, loaded with tiny toppings meant to create the perfect bite, every bite.

Such is the gamble with pop-ups. While the pizza does sell itself in certain ways, it doesn’t make itself, and the smaller, artisanal-scale of the product also means a smaller crew, who can only make so many pizzas per night.

Shapiro, with One Eyed Dog Pizza, said their operation started with 30 pizzas for their first drop last September. “That was so easy, that was like restful,” she said.

Shapiro and Houmand maxed out around 80 pizzas, which “kind of killed us,” she said. For more recent drops, they’ve reduced that number to 70.

Pew limits himself to about 100 per night, understanding that about 90 will make it into people’s hands. He said he understands that it can be frustrating to try and fail to get one of his pizzas, but he prefers it to a walk-up model, which he used early on when he was operating out of Arlo in the Marmalade area.

Pew said he would rather have someone disappointed for a few minutes on their phone, instead of waiting a few hours in line and still get disappointed.

To fulfill orders now, he and Garcia spend pizza evenings as a rhythmic blur of arms, operating amid scatterings of dusty white flour, grabbing blobs of dough, stretching them, slapping on slices of mozzarella and pouring circles of red tomato sauce and toppings. Over and over again, about 100 times.

Pew said they go through about 50 pounds of cheese — a combination of mozzarella and gouda — per night and slice all of it the night before, arranging it like shingles on parchment paper they can easily flip to top the pizza.

“We were here last night,” Pew said Tuesday, as he stretched yet another glob of dough into a thin disc, “we kind of got behind, we were here at like 10 o’clock at night, like shingling cheese like, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’”

That way is coming.

Dreams realized

Pew has been making pizzas out of Leavity Bread’s space since he transitioned out of Arlo’s kitchen. The journey took them to the aluminum-sided industrial building near the Salt Lake City airport, where Pew joked “it was real secret pizza club,” to this new more centrally located space off Salt Lake City’s Main Street about a year and a half ago.

“Sam is the best,” Bradley said. “He deserves every bit of success that he’s having and getting.”

Even if that success means Pew, who was also Bradley’s employee at the bakery, has to step away from that to focus on pizza full-time.

Pew said Bradley had recently encouraged him to “chase this down,” and quit his gig at the bakery to focus on pizza. Now, he’s looking for a spot to move to “as soon as possible,” he said.

The biggest challenge so far has been finding a suitable place. Pew said he likely drives real estate agents nuts, but “it’s a big commitment,” he said.

That ideal location is small, about 1,000 square feet, he said, reminiscent of the mom-and-pop pizza shops familiar to those on the East Coast.

That may be another reason for the lack of neighborhood pizza shops in Salt Lake City, Pew mused — the lack of density means fewer spots available that are already built out with the equipment necessary for pizza.

Of course, Pew is also worried that making the pizza more available will sacrifice some of its appeal. How special is a pizza that everyone can get?

But Pew said he’s encouraged by the mix of repeat customers at his weekly drops. Plus, he has to trust his core principle.

“I always stand by the fact,” he said, “that I think every neighborhood needs a good mom-pop pizza shop.”

One Eyed Dog Pizza, which hasn’t done a drop since the summer, is also poised to make the switch to brick-and-mortar soon, becoming the couple’s dreamed of pizza-and-dessert shop, said Shapiro, who also runs the online bakery Lady Flour.

Going into the pop-up business, Shapiro said they “had a feeling it would be well-received, because I do think think Salt Lake folks are really hungry for really high quality pizza.”

They’ve tested that theory out and found it correct. Their pizza is quite popular. They have a Salt Lake City location picked out for when they take the next step, she said, but no timeline just yet.

Pop-up launch pad

Before Marcus Chen made pizzas, he was a middle school science teacher with a “lofty dream” of running the type of spot he remembered hanging out at with his friends growing up.

But the journey to Priscilla’s Pizza mostly started as an extension of his interest into fermentation and breadmaking after the coronavirus pandemic. He said he arrived at pizza because he just “wanted to put more on my bread.”

Like Pew, Chen’s pop-up started in his home in Sandy. First, he just served his family and friends. And then friends of friends and eventually complete strangers.

“I had people, like, literally, waiting in my living room,” he said.

Since then, he’s begun peddling pizza at other establishments, most recently Picnic Cafe. He described his pizza as fairly traditional but with “nontraditional ingredients.”

His sauce, for example, is plum tomatoes mixed with kimchi for umami, a flavor typically derived from anchovies. Priscilla’s “meat lovers” pizza is a take on a Vietnamese hot pot, with fish balls and pickled red onions.

The name is a cheeky nod to Chen’s mother, Priscilla, who is not a pizza fan. But he said he grew up eating the food his mother, who is from Burma (now known as Myanmar), cooked for the family.

“I told her I was going to name the pizza thing after her,” Chen said, “and she kind of had to be OK with it.”

Chen said he began to realize just how good his pizza was when his mom’s attitude started to change. He posted a photo of her on his Instagram in July, holding a slice in her hand above a paper plate, her mouth opened in a pre-bite grin.

“That picture is kind of funny, just because that was the first slice that she really liked,” he said. He began to wonder: “Is this more than just an obsessive hobby?”

Now he uses her stylized face, posed in a similar grin, in his pop-up’s logo. His next event is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 18, again at Picnic.

The popularity of his and other smaller, more limited pizza operation shows, Chen said, that Utahns are increasingly excited about dining culture and eager to try new things.

It also speaks to an increased thoughtfulness in where food comes from and how it’s prepared, he added. That can be seen in the success of other less traditional food spots, like the Girls Who Smash burgers food truck or the wide-ranging Thank You For the Short Notice pop-ups.

“People just want to connect on a deeper level to their food,” Chen said, “and it’s showing.”

Pizza is also a unifier, a nostalgic food meant to be shared. The more good pizza in a city, the more people will gather around it, and the better the city will be. At least, that’s what these pop-up owners believe and what they’re aiming for.

“There’s the sentiment,” Shapiro said, “of wanting to improve Salt Lake City as a whole.”

One slice at a time.

Note to readers • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.