October '23: Saint Francis Apizza News and Reflections
How the Best Pizza Restaurant in America Thinks About Growth
How the Best Pizza Restaurant in America Thinks About Growth
Dan Richer, chef/owner of Razza in Jersey City, New Jersey, on growth, putting first things first, and what happened when his restaurant’s pizza was called ‘The Best in New York.'
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I'm the owner of the pizza restaurant Saint Francis Apizza in Cincinnati, OH. I write a newsletter most months to send out updates about the pizzeria, share my love of pizza and the travels I embark on to learn more about my favorite food, and the business behind it.
I’ve been writing a newsletter from my vantage point as a relatively new business owner every month for about two years. My goal has been to be authentic as I share a little bit of insight into our business. I hope it’s a useful read for other small business owners, and ‘small business-curious’ people who might be on the fence.
This newsletter is also a way for me to connect with you about my genuine love of pizza.
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- Alex, owner of Saint Francis Apizza
Today I’m digging into what makes Razza, the New Jersey pizza restaurant famously called the ‘Best Pizza in New York’, the best in the business
Razza is a full-service, independently-owned restaurant in Jersey City, New Jersey. It has been recognized as the Best Pizza Restaurant in America by 50 Best, and Dan Richer, its chef/owner, has been a James Beard Award Best Chef Semi-Finalist multiple times. Formal accolades aside, I have dined at Razza. I promise it lives up to the hype!
I’ve wanted to dig into what makes Razza so outstanding for a long time. Razza become nationally known in 2019 when Pete Wells, restaurant critic of The New York Times, wrote this splashy headline: “Is New York’s Best Pizza in New Jersey?” In 2021 Dan Richer, Razza’s chef/owner/founder published what to me is the best pizza cookbook out there: The Joy of Pizza (co-authored with Katie Parla). Razza recently doubled its physical space in 2021, by expanding into the building directly next door.
While The New York Times hasn’t created this kind of ‘very good problem’ for us, yet, I’m at a crossroads of my own. We’re exploring the option to open another restaurant location, change or expand our current space, or simply keep our physical space the way it is while ‘growing inwardly’ as Dan will discuss in our conversation below.
I believe that Razza is hugely successful because:
Its product is second to none. Razza rose to the top of the most competitive restaurant market in the U.S., if not the world: New York City.
It favors ‘inward growth’ through continuous improvement. They downsized from two locations to one, in order to go deeper, not broader.
Razza has expanded its single location with cautious intentionality. The Razza team held off on expanding its footprint until the evidence supporting that decision was overwhelming. Even then the scale of the expansion was moderate enough that much of it could be covered by the business’ savings (reducing risk).
Razza’s products avoid gimmicks. Just great food and service.
They are masters of defining what excellence means to them. Then they hit that bar every single day.
The elements that amount to Razza’s brand are tightly integrated. The physical space, communications, and product all express the same unique identity and values.
The team culture at Razza is nurturing yet rigorous. Dan takes care of his team, yet also expects their best.
Now for my conversation with Dan, which took place in September 2023. This interview has been condensed and edited.
Why Dan ‘only’ has one restaurant location, despite it being one of the most excellent and in-demand in the world
Dan, don’t you know that when your restaurant is successful you’re supposed to open another one? Why have you so far decided not to do that with Razza?
So I actually did [expand to two separate restaurants]. I started my first restaurant in 2006 when I was 26 [Arturo’s in Maplewood, New Jersey]. I bought a failing restaurant that happened to have two wood fired ovens and a really bad pizza recipe. And then I changed one thing at a time organically, as I learned. I owned [Arturo’s] for ten years. About halfway in, five or six years in, I wanted to expand, so I took on a partner and built out Razza.
Razza was massively struggling. It was going downhill. I was not happy. It was one of the most unhappy times in my life. I built the first restaurant [Arturo’s] from something failing to something that had a cult-like status because we did the right thing every day. The food was great. I developed this community of people around the restaurant, both our team and the physical community that supported us. And then when I expanded, I lost my community. I wasn't a part of it anymore, and I need that personally. I need to be a part of the team, and I need to be a part of the community that we're serving in order to be happy. The restaurant business is very difficult and challenging and requires a lot of of time. And when your time is spent without community, for me at least… I need that to be happy. I need to be surrounded by people who I genuinely care about and who genuinely care about me. So once I realized how unhappy I was, I sold my first restaurant to the partner that I took on, and I focused on Razza, which was struggling. It was a very risky move to sell the successful restaurant and focus on the one that was struggling. But I love a good fight. I like being in that position of trying to make something more beautiful and trying to make something better today than it was yesterday. That's when I thrive.
Six months later, we had [the] New York Times review. It wasn't until I let go of the successful restaurant and really put all of my energy and care into Razza that we got that recognition. And it's been a wild ride ever since.
Sometimes people don't ask themselves how a huge decision like expanding will make them feel, until it's too late.
Some people have the mindset: ‘You have to grow in size both financially and physically. You have to take on more locations. It's all about growth, growth, growth.’
Well, there are multiple different ways of growth. We grow every day at the restaurant, but it's more of an internal thing. Our systems develop every day. Our food gets better every day, and we grow personally and professionally every day. Should we take on more responsibility and/or more debt to open additional locations? That puts stress and pressure on the team that we already have. It stretches everyone's time, and time is honestly the most valuable thing that we have. If I were to expand in other locations, it would put enormous pressure on my wife and my children who I barely see as is. And you know what? What do I value the most? The thing that I value most is time. And [the people whom] I surround myself with, both my friends, family and my team, and our guests at the restaurant. That's the most important thing to me. Now, if those people are ever in need of me expanding, then I'll think more carefully about expansion. I would love to expand one day, but the time is not now. My kids are too important to me. My team is too important to me. And none of those people are ready for me to expand.
It seems like your decisions are guided by your values.
Life is short. I don't want to be completely stressed out and stretched thin all the time, and miss more of life. I work a lot as is: five solid days at the restaurant. If I'm working less than 12 hour days, I feel like it’s too short of a day. [It’s] 12 to 15 hours a day, five days a week. And then when I'm not at the restaurant on Sundays and Mondays, I'm doing other things, whether it's catching up on my emails or social media or having phone calls that I didn't get to the rest of the week.
It already is a lot of work… and then to take on additional responsibilities financially? Employing a person is a huge responsibility, and employing a team of people is a huge responsibility. I don't take that lightly. We're responsible for making sure that they can pay their rent, feed their family, and I take that obligation very seriously. That's one of the other things that prevents me from wanting to build another team in a different location. Teams need to be nurtured. The culture of the team within a restaurant is one of the most important things. It's equal to the food. You can't have great quality food with a team who is not engaged, if they don't care, if they're not being taken care of, if they're not being nurtured. So we spend a lot of time on the culture of the team and making sure that it's in the best state that it can be for that moment.
How Dan knew it was time to expand Razza, and what he made sure to get right
You doubled the square footage of your restaurant in 2021. How did you know when it was time to expand?
So the first four years we couldn't fill the seats consistently. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday were on the slower side. There were empty tables and we weren't maxed out. It's pretty cold in the winter and nobody really wants to leave their house. So filling those tables, especially in the winter, was very difficult. And when you don't have guests in seats, then you have staff that aren't getting paid. And when a team is not getting paid extraordinarily well, they are less committed to the business because the business is not supporting them.
I think it was about four and a half years in [2017] that we got the big New York Times review, and then it was the opposite. There were too many people for the amount of seats. Then the staff is getting paid. Everybody's happy. It's great. But now it's not enough space. So we weren't at that point where we needed to be. We physically needed more, or would’ve liked more space: more refrigeration space, easier access to storage, all those things. We needed a bigger dishwashing station. Because our first dishwashing station was so tight that it was uncomfortable to work there, so we couldn't keep dishwashers. In this constant state of the dishwasher not wanting to do the work, you're spending your time finding and trying to retain dishwashers because the physical space wasn't conducive to comfort.
What went into the decision to finally expand?
Most of it was organic, but very well-planned. The original Razza space is only 1200 square feet, with no real basement. It's a very small space. Just getting the restaurant open on a daily basis was a challenge. It's amazing that we made it eight years without additional space. I knew I needed to expand, and I wanted to expand, but it took a long time for us to be ready to expand. The first four years in business were painful [Before the NYT review]. The city of Jersey City was not what it is today. Years before I signed the lease, I started putting feelers out. Our landlords own the building next door to to the original space. They knew I was ready for expansion. So when their tenant finally decided to close their business, it was a no-brainer for them and for us. So it happened very organically and very naturally.
What made you decide to expand into the space next door, versus relocating to a larger space?
I have a great relationship with our our landlord. They want us to be successful. We want them to be successful. We're a part of their success and they're a part of ours, so that's fantastic. It’s unlike most landlord relationships that I've had in the past, in that I’m partnering with the right people, especially important when I'm building my life and my family's life around this restaurant. I need to be in partnership with people who want us to be successful, and for it to be as fruitful for everyone as possible. So we really wanted to partner with a landlord that [valued] the same things that we value.
How Dan approached the massive financial commitment of expansion
Expanding a restaurant is really expensive. How did you approach that challenge?
The original Razza space, I started on a very, very low budget. Very low, like under $200,000 low. [We were able to carry out] the expansion because we had more money coming into the restaurant [at that point]. I just didn't get paid for a very long time. But I used all the profits [generated by Razza] for the expansion. I refused to take on investors because I don't want to work for somebody else. That's not why I'm in small business. I took out small loans for the expansion: one for bakery equipment. That was like $90,000, for a really big mixer and all these things that we've needed for years, but struggled through. [We used to have] a very small dough mixer that I bought on day one. I bought it for $2,500 and we mixed six batches of dough a day. We used that mixer for a very long time. So spending $12,000 on a gigantic mixer? I had zero problem doing [that]. I felt great about it. There were a lot of purchases like that that I will happily take out a loan to make my team's life easier because they've done it for such a long time, and they know how to do it in not so ideal situations. But getting the right equipment is going to make their lives easier. I'm fully happy to take out a loan to do that.
And then I had to take out another loan for some of the other building costs. Fortunately the interest rate was pretty low. These [loans were from] individual investors. Because a bank will never give a restaurant a loan if you don't own the real estate. At least it's very, very uncommon for a bank to give a restaurant a loan if it is not collateralized.
The build-out was more expensive than I've ever spent on anything. But it's a pretty simple formula for figuring out if your business can handle it, especially when we had the built in-demand. Even though I actually took out these loans during the pandemic when we didn't have the business to support the loans, I had faith in my team and our product and myself that we were we were going to fill the seats. We didn't take on more debt than the seats could allow.
I knew we were going to fill the tables, and I knew what our check average was. So it was a pretty simple formula.
How Razza’s physical space helps to communicate the brand
How does the design of your physical restaurant space align with the food and the service?
I love that you see that connection because I take a very similar standpoint about food and design space. I try to be as hands off as possible and really look at the raw materials and space. I try to understand them for what they are and their natural beauty. I try not to do too much to them because they are so inherently perfect. The harder I try to manipulate them, the less of themselves are available for people to see. I try to be as hands-off as possible. I appreciate the natural, raw beauty of them. The original Razza space is in the entrance to a theater that was built right around the turn of the century. It was a vaudeville theater that was popular around the very early 1900s, and then went through 60 years of being boarded up. So there's a very rich history there and some natural elements to the space that are just stunning. And you can't build walls that look like ours. So why would I want to cover them up? I want to appreciate how rich they are. I try to do nothing to them.
At first I wasn't totally sure if you were talking about the food or the space, which is a compliment.
It's the same exact thing. When you have this perfect tomato or this perfect strawberry, it would be a crime to do anything to them except sprinkle a little bit of salt and maybe a little bit of extra virgin olive oil on them. It's the same exact approach.
The ‘new side’ of the restaurant, or the expansion, looks very different from the original side. Why?
Same exact thing. [The new side] feels completely different than the original space we had. The expansion side has these giant floor-to-ceiling windows which let a lot of light into the space. The original space has three tiny little windows and feels dark and moody and cavernous, and it feels like an old, old space that's been there for a hundred years, which it has! The new space is bright, airy, has high ceilings, and it's just so much brighter. So there's no possible way that I was ever going to make the new space feel like the old space. I took that same approach [as with the original side]. There's a very old brick wall that is gnarly and has all this texture to it, so we did nothing to it. It's got these big old structural, rustic beams exposed in the wall. So we cleaned them up a bit, but we tried not to clean them up too much. The two spaces feel very different. I'm okay with that because I honored what was. What was there.
Any challenges during the build-out of the new space?
[The two spaces] are connected in the back of the space because of the physical restraints. Because of where the utilities come into the building and [because] there's a staircase running right in between the two spaces, we couldn't connect them in the front. We had to connect them in the back. It's just naturally a quirky and weird space that feels like us as a team and me as an individual. We're weird, we're different, we're quirky, but we're making the best of it. We embrace it.
How Dan keeps his team engaged and striving for excellence
How do you continue to nurture the culture of your team as you grow?
It's a daily thing. Our team [has] a meeting every single day, which is formal with what we're discussing, but we always leave room for open discussion. But then I'm there talking to my team every single day and making sure that that they're taken care of the same way that we take care of our guests every moment that a guest is in the restaurant.
We do team outings. We've been pretty busy this year, so it's hasn't been as frequent this year as in the past. We've done everything from trips to a winery to pick grapes to… I've taken our managers to California, Italy, all over the place. A lot of it is just genuinely being there for an individual, whether it's getting them help when they have a drug problem, or bringing them together when there's a death in the family. [It’s about] genuinely being there and supporting them physically and emotionally, professionally and personally, just trying to do the right thing every day. And my priorities are that — not building an empire of restaurants.
How do you communicate with your staff when something needs to improve?
The first part is constant gentle pressure. It's the Danny Meyer way. There are always going to be things that need to be changed. There are always going to be behaviors that need to be corrected. We do it constantly and gently, with respect to the individual and the team. Nobody is going to work for somebody who is a screamer. That doesn't work.
[We] constantly [correct] behaviors. Constantly. [It’s about] trying to not get upset about it and just recognizing that behaviors need to be constantly corrected. I have a six year old and a seven year old. And it's a lot like correcting some of their behaviors. We do it constantly, and we do it gently. And eventually they they recognize that this behavior is not acceptable.
The behavior could be anything from, you know, sending out a pizza that is undercooked or overcooked. It could be literally anything. Constant, gentle correction. And it's so important because if you don't correct those behaviors, then that shows that you accept that behavior. And if you accept a certain behavior by not correcting it, then you are condoning it, and that becomes ‘the way.’ So you have an obligation to constantly correct the actions. If you don’t, then there's nobody to blame except the leader. You could complain about how somebody on your team doesn't care about this, or, ‘We can't get them to do that.’ You have to look at the top, and look at yourself, and say, ‘You know what, I'm the leader. Maybe it's my fault.’
The Business/Leadership Book Dan Recommends
Danny Meyer's book is incredible. It's called Setting The Table. He's just a phenomenal human being and communicates in a very profound way. Any business can take these lessons. But certainly anyone in the in the restaurant business can take a lot from from his book!
The Pizza/Bread Book Dan Recommends
There's a new bread book called The Perfect Loaf by Maurizio Leo. That's the bread book for the next ten, 20 years. It's phenomenal. For any pizza dough nerds out there, that's my favorite book right now.
Thanks for reading, and thank you to Dan Richer for taking to share his wisdom with me! I hope you found Dan’s insights as valuable as I did. You can send me a question, comment, or suggestion for a future newsletter topic by emailing saintfrancisapizza@gmail.com.
Really enjoy reading your thoughts on business development and leadership. How you're approaching your business is cool and your team is creating an amazing product. Congrats on the success so far and keep up the great work!