The Coolest Pit Stop in Charlotte
For an authentic New York pizzeria experience, many diners are steering a little south of the Big Apple to Charlotte, North Carolina — home of the Fuel Pizza Cafes.
What started out as a single 1,200 square-foot pizza place in a remodeled 1930s era corner Pure Oil gas station has grown to nine stores with future expansion anticipated. All Fuel Pizza Cafe locations are in the greater Charlotte metropolitan area with several in or near the urban downtown area. The locations farthest from the center city are north of Charlotte in Davidson, to the west in Gastonia, and to the south in neighboring Rock Hill, South Carolina. Other Charlotte suburbs, as well as the Washington D.C and Atlanta regions, are being “tossed around” as additional areas for expansion.
Voted “Best Pizza” by readers of Charlotte Magazine every year since they opened, Fuel Pizza was established by Jeremy Wladis and Lincoln Clark in 1997. The two had moved to Charlotte from New York City, but couldn’t find a pie that met their standards, so they lured a few pizza makers south and opened their own place.
Ten years and nine locations later, Wladis and Clark still own the Fuel Pizza Cafes as part of The Restaurant Group, a privately held company that includes Fuel Pizza, Jolina, a TexMex-style barbeque restaurant also located in Charlotte, as well as Nonna, and the Firehouse, both in New York. They’ve added a few other partners along the way, including Zach Current, Area Manager for Fuel Pizza.
“All of the Fuel Pizza Cafe restaurants use the old gas station theme, but they range in size from 1,200 to 5,000 square feet,” Current says. “But our concept is one that works in a shopping center or as a freestanding store. We even have one in the base of a 50-story building in downtown Charlotte.”
Fuel Pizza’s various locations seat from 40 to 140 customers, but no matter the restaurant size, the kitchen is generally one-quarter of the overall square footage. The kitchen includes a prep area, with the pizza-making process visible to customers, and is home to natural gas conveyor-style ovens for baking the crust and then finishing the pizza. Piedmont Natural Gas, headquartered in Charlotte, supplies the “fuel” that bakes the pizza in those ovens, as well as for the other natural gas equipment in most of the Fuel Pizza locations.
“Since their first location opened here almost ten years ago, Fuel Pizza has become one of the area’s premier pizza establishments,” says Greg Johnson, Manager - Commercial Marketing for Piedmont, the natural gas utility that serves all six of Fuel Pizza’s locations in Charlotte. “They have a vintage gas station ‘look and feel’ to them, but what keeps bringing customers back are the excellent food and their ‘Buy the Slice’ ad message for walk-in customers who don’t want to buy a whole pizza. If all you want is one or two slices, you can select from what they have already waiting for you. ”
Notes Johnson, “Fuel Pizza is a growth-oriented restaurant company that has a great concept and can operate in a variety of settings. We value them as an important year-round customer. They use a wide variety of natural gas equipment for cooking, as well as for outdoor and indoor space heating and water heating.”
The Right Ingredients
Zach Current says Wladis and Clark recognized Charlotte as an up-and-coming town a decade ago. They enjoyed the people and the city. They just couldn’t find the kind of pizza they enjoyed in New York — a problem that to them was fixable — with the right sauce.
While in the beginning they tried using fresh tomatoes, it was difficult to maintain consistency, Current says. So they did the next best thing, which was to search for just the right canned tomato.
“The secret is in the sauce,” Current says. “We are one of the few pizzerias that season its own sauce. We start with the best quality California crushed tomatoes from Escalon Premier Brands and then add fresh herbs and garlic.”
Of course, consistently good crust is also a necessity in the pizza game.
“Our pizza has a New York-style hand-tossed crust that is crunchy, but chewy,” Current says. “It’s handmade in each of our restaurants. It’s time consuming, but worth it.”
The third key ingredient is quality cheese and other toppings.
“We use the best products you can buy, like Grande Cheese from Wisconsin,” he says. “We feel the crunch when prices go up but we will not switch to lower-quality products.”
Everybody is a Customer
Current says in the pizza business, everyone is a potential customer. To illustrate that point, he tells how he walked into a Fuel Pizza Cafe recently and watched while a homeless person counted out change at the counter to buy a slice of pizza while at the same time a businessman was carrying out as many $20 pizzas as he could carry.
In addition to selling pizza by the slice, Fuel Pizza can handle delivery orders for 50 pies or more, and Current adds that they have made as many as 300 pizzas for a single order.
“Several of our locations are two miles or less from each other, so we’ll piggyback orders,” Current explains. “A driver will start at one location with 50 pizzas and pick up 50 at each stop until the order is filled.”
The delivery business now represents less than 15 percent of Fuel Pizza’s sales, but that could increase as business expands in the suburbs. Their “kids’ build-your-own pizza parties” and their “take and bake” sales could also increase as their presence in the suburbs grows. Neighborhood schools, churches and sports teams will also be able to take advantage of Fuel’s fundraising opportunities. Groups can raise money by selling take and bake pizzas and keeping $5 a pie, or holding a “benefit night” where they receive 15 percent of sales at a Fuel Pizza location.
“Up until now we’ve focused on an urban core, where we looked at density of population and not number of rooftops,” Current says. “But from here on out we’re going to do a circumference of the city.”
In the more congested city areas where Fuel Pizza Cafe restaurants are located, the delivery areas are determined by traffic more than distance.
“This is how we figure out the limits: on a Thursday or Friday, when traffic is heaviest, we drive in every direction from the restaurant for seven minutes and that becomes our delivery circumference. Some locations, we deliver 2.5 miles; others, it’s more like one mile. We don’t want to stretch it out so one driver is gone 30 minutes on a $12 order.”
Fueled by Natural Gas
While delivery times vary, it always takes Fuel under 10 minutes to cook a pizza in one of their gas conveyor ovens.
“Natural gas ovens are more consistent than electric, so generally we can cook a pizza in seven minutes at 485°F,” notes Mark Maxen, General Manager of Fuel Pizza’s original location at Central and Pecan Streets.
Greg Johnson agrees. “Temperatures and belt speeds can be precisely set to insure consistent quality pizza with every pie. Natural gas conveyor ovens are both energy- and labor-efficient. This makes them a great choice for the kitchen of a busy pizza restaurant like Fuel.”
“Our best seller is pepperoni,” he says. “That’s the one everybody loves. And of our 19 specialty pizzas, the Extreme Fuel does the best.”
The Extreme Fuel is topped with pepperoni, Italian sausage, meatballs, ham and ground beef. The 14-inch pie sells for $14.95.
Wings and Things
In addition to pizza, stromboli and calzones are also available. For the record, both stromboli and calzones are filled with pizza ingredients and baked, but a stromboli is rolled and a calzone is folded. Also, a calzone has ricotta and mozzarella cheeses while a stromboli has only mozzarella.
And if those offerings aren’t enough to satisfy hungry Charlotte diners, Fuel Pizza Cafe is also gaining quite a reputation for its wings.
Gas Equipment List
(Original Location at Pecan & Central)
1 Lincoln Conveyor Oven — Model 1040;
120,000 BTU/hr.
1 Blodgett Conveyor Oven
1 State Water Heater — 199,000 BTU/hr.
2 Pitco Fryers — 75,000 BTU/hr., each
1 Star Two Burner Surface Range
40,000 BTU/hr.
2 Space-Ray Infrared Ceiling Mount Patio
Heaters — 60,000 BTU/hr.
“We pride ourselves on having extra crispy wings and we couldn’t do that without natural gas,” he says. “We have two natural gas fryers in each location and we deep fry the wings. Gas fryers keep their heat and recover quickly which helps us put out a lot of wings.”
The wings start at $6.95 for an order of nine and go to $29.95 for a 45-piece order. Other starters on the menu include Fuel Fries, which are seasoned waffle fries, and also come out of the natural gas fryers extra light and crispy. Garlic knots round out the appetizer selection.
“For the knots, we spread out the dough and put garlic salt on it, then strips of dough are tied into knots and allowed to rise before being baked in a natural gas oven,” said Maxen. “The knots, which are the size of golf balls, are seasoned with olive oil and fresh garlic. We actually put them in a bucket and shake it up. They are then reheated in the gas oven and served warm.”
For those who can’t choose between the award-winning pizza, famous wings or popular garlic bread knots, there are six combinations to choose from. Combo 5, called the Ultimate Party Pack, outsells all the rest. It includes two 14-inch one-topping pizzas, 27 wings and 13 garlic knots for $39.95.
Finding Good Help
As Fuel Pizza grows, more and more staff is required, and for the monster task of recruiting great employees, this expanding local chain looks to the Internet for assistance, using Monster, Career Builder and Craig’s List.
“For management candidates, we use the online job sites,” Current says. “That’s definitely the way to go these days. Plus we have an employee referral program for hourly and management positions where people can get a monetary bonus if they recommend someone we end up hiring. We also get a lot of walk-ins seeking employment because we have locations that are pretty visible.”
To ensure consistency in both the product and the service provided at Fuel Pizza Cafes, a consultant was hired to write a training manual outlining the day-to-day operations of the restaurants.
“Everybody goes through the same orientation,” Current says. “The first 10 shifts are the same for all employees. They start with sanitation and safety, work through register, cash handling and all kitchen positions except pizza maker.”
Pizza makers require additional training, but everything else is covered in those first 10 shifts. That cross-training ensures employees can fill in on whatever needs to be done.
“People never know what they might be called on to do. They might start a shift cooking wings and then be needed to cashier,” Current says.
Fuel is run like a New York pizzeria, which means there is no waitstaff. Food is ordered at the counter, customers are assigned a number and an employee runs their food out to their table when it’s ready.
“We did it that way because that’s the way New York pizzerias operate,” Current explains. “And now it’s turning out to be the way the food industry is going — quick casual. But it’s not ‘fast food’ because we have so many options of customization.”
Each Fuel Pizza Cafe location has a general manager and an assistant general manager. In addition, the partners divide up the locations and visit each restaurant frequently. With this type of hands on involvement and the dependability of natural gas, Fuel Pizza Cafes will continue to increase their slice of the pizza market in Charlotte.
“Our goal is to be the number one independent pizzeria in America,” Current says.
Original Location: Central Ave. & Pecan Ave., Charlotte, NC
Phone: (704) 376-FUEL
www.fuelpizza.com
Hours of Operation: Typically open 7 days a week from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Some locations are open later.
Other Locations: South End, Convention Center, Hearst Tower, Rivergate, Davidson, Gastonia and Park Road — all in North Carolina, plus Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Concept: New York style pizzeria with a vintage gas station theme
Menu Sampling: Pizza by the pie or slice, plus calzones, stromboli, wings and hot subs.
Owners: The Restaurant Group, which includes founders Jeremy Wladis and Lincoln Clark, plus partners including Zach Current.
Average Ticket: $11
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