Pacifico Pizza Napoletana

Kaneohe, Hawaii

Last year, Alastair and Brittany Hannmann rebranded their 10-year old concept, Kaneohe’s Boston Pizza, into Pacifico Pizza Napoletana, Hawaii’s only pizzeria serving four authentic pizza styles: Pizza Napoletana, Traditional New York Style, Chicago Deep Dish and Sicilian Pan. The Hannmans operate two locations — Kaneohe and Kapolei on Oahu.

Alastair Hannmann, co-owner of Pacifico Pizza Napoletana, Hawaii’s only pizzeria serving four authentic pizza styles: Pizza Napoletana, Traditional New York Style, Chicago Deep Dish and Sicilian Pan

Alastair lets us in on executing multiple pizza styles

The concept of our pizzeria is a fast-casual slice house that takes our customers on a journey through the four major pizza cities in the world. We use multiple ovens: wood, gas and electric. Our main focus is authenticity through products we source from around to world and the techniques we use to create them.

Hannmann provides three tips on offering multiple styles —

1. Do your homework. Make sure you know the style that you want to start and if you can source the ingredients. Are you a takeout heavy business? Which style will hold up better? Over the past two years we incorporated wood fire. I was fascinated to cook a pizza in 90 seconds, but did not realize as I got into it that Neapolitan pizza is horrible as take out. It also can’t be sold by the slice, so we were left with a style of pizza that was just not producing. We had to re-market ourselves and teach customers about Neapolitan pizza, that this type of pizza is supposed to be soft, chewy and wet. People also did not want to shell out $17 for a Margherita when they could choose from our showcase pizza by the slice, which ranged from $7 to $10 per slice from three other styles. Neapolitans are a slow mover on our menu, but we continue to keep it traditional and have a solid customer base now that comes in specifically for true Neapolitan pizza.
2. Try it before you buy it. There’s a lot of equipment out there these days. Some of it’s good; some of it’s not. A lot of times most manufacturers just want to sell the machine. They don’t really care about your final product. A lot of them have test kitchens to where you can actually bring your product and try it out. This is imperative to making sure you will get what you want. Pizza Expo is great to see what’s working, especially if you’re interested in different styles. The cooking competition at Expo is awesome to see the different types of pizza people bring and what type of oven they use to cook it.
3. When sourcing equipment for another style, try to see if you could use the same equipment to make other products. Just in case it doesn’t work out, you can still have something to fall back on. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling these days offering tips and tricks to a lot of operators who are getting into the business.

More with Alastair Hannmann on multiple styles in an in-depth Q&A @ pizzatoday.com/news/pizza-headlines/alastair-hannmann-multiple-styles/