Regents Pizzeria La Jolla: A $7.7M Success Story
When Bill Vivian embarked on a remodel in late 2024, the goal was not simply to update the dining room at Regents Pizzeria, which celebrated its 20-year anniversary in December 2025. Rather, his focus was improving kitchen throughput and order times for customers, who purchase more than 20,000 slices per month.
“Most of the money was spent in the kitchen,” Vivian tells Pizza Today, adding that industrial engineers designed a labor-management system to eliminate bottlenecks and increase efficiency. New York-style pizzas that once took 90 minutes on a busy Friday night now come out of the kitchen in 25 minutes.
The remodel added another make line and moved slices closer to the pizza oven, allowing staffers to pull slices for quicker re-heating. “That increases our labor efficiency and also helps us be ready for the guest,” Vivian says.
Between a new mixer with capacity for 200 pounds of flour and eight new ovens, Vivian is ready to take the business to the next level – an impressive feat, considering sales at the single-unit pizza shop cleared $7.7 million in 2025 with year-over-year growth of 12.6%.
The giant mixer generates significant heat, so Regents worked with a flour manufacturer to calculate water temperatures that allow dough to emerge from the mixer at optimum temperature every time. “They gave us a formula or an algorithm that we put into a spreadsheet. If you know the air temperature and the flour temperature, which changes every day, and the coefficient of friction of your mixer – the amount of heat that it adds to the dough, and that is unique to you – there’s a grid. Then, we know the water temperature that has to go into the mixer,” Vivian explains.
Another area where Regents stands out is its craft beer menu, which features 30 taps typically including Pliny the Younger, a triple IPA popular with beer aficionados. To build the tap system, Vivian sought input from Stone Brewing, a respected San Diego business, and instructed the equipment supplier to build the best beer system possible. “Everybody who touches a tap is certified,” Vivian says, giving a nod to the Cicerone Certification Program for beer service. Consequently, customers can tell bartenders what type of beer they typically enjoy, and servers are trained to match patrons to their choice within three tastes.
Regents does nearly 50% of its business off premise, including a catering arm responsible for 16% of daytime business. The pizzeria doesn’t advertise its catering services but rather relies on word of mouth marketing based on strong logistics and execution. Making the administrative assistant ordering food look like a hero, Vivian says, is a sure-fire way to get added to the rotation. The pizzeria accomplishes this by completing orders before the lunch rush and using its own delivery staff for catering.
To achieve his next goals, Vivian has implemented a training program and steps of service intended to take the guest experience technicolor. He calls the program Ultimate Hospitality, adding, “We already have colorful service. We want it to be bright colors, full-spectrum, surprise and delight.”
