PT: You’re pretty much a one-man-show here, right?
MP: Pretty much. I’m the only one working. I only have one employee. I have a delivery driver who works evenings. He’s extremely competent, and he can do pretty much everything in the shop except cook. And he does. And I can do anything in the shop, so between the two of us he handles all the deliveries and I handle all the cooking. Everything else in between, whoever can do it … does it.
PT: You seem to have a lot of regular customers who either live or work in your neighborhood. Have you gotten to know most of your customers well?
MP: I may not know what everybody’s name is, but I know probably 75 percent of the faces.
PT: Why not hire servers? Do you not have the volume necessary for that?
PT: How do you go about cultivating regular customers?
MP: My philosophy is that if I can get them in there the first time, I can get them back. We’ve got a real unique product. I think it’s a high-quality product.
PT: When you first opened, did you find that people in Louisville were familiar with Chicago-style pizza?
MP: No. It took a long time. I opened in the first week of November (11 years ago), and I didn’t start doing stuffed pizza until probably February (of the following year). It was a completely foreign concept to this neighborhood. This neighborhood doesn’t offer a whole lot of variety as far as dining, so it was completely new. Some people took to it really quickly, and some people were put off and didn’t like it at all.