“I fell in love with pizza from watching 'Ninja Turtles 2,' that very first scene when it opens and it’s a packed place and people are scarfing the big slices... As I worked at pizza shops, I said 'I want to open a shop like that,'” Wehrly says.In 2020, when the pandemic first hit and the world stood still, Gist started to meander around his kitchen, looking for innovative pizza-making methods.
“We spent so much of our time making the one style of pizza — we thought we knew everything about it," Wehrly says."But the more you educate yourself, you realize what you don’t know.” “It was bittersweet at the time because, you know, all of this real estate was available, equipment was available for cheap — restaurants were going out of business. The flip side of this: We were able to get in here with a working class kind of budget,” Gist says.