Midwest couple introduced Chicago-style pizza to Bay Area
by Jeremy White
December, 2002
Why would anyone open a Chicago-style pizzeria in Oakland? Californians don't want stuffed pizza pies. They want lighter, healthier pizzas, like gourmet offerings that feature sun-dried tomatoes and spinach, right?
Not necessarily. Taking Chicago-style pizza to the West coast may seem like a risk, but it couldn't have worked better for Zach Zachowski and Barbara Gabel, the husband and wife ownership team that opened Zachary's Chicago Pizza 19 years ago on Oakland's College Avenue.
The menu is basic; just pizza and salads, but the atmosphere is clean and the pizzeria has a list of accolades a mile long to support the owners' quality claims.
"You always question whether your restaurant is going to make it or not, because the odds are so against you, but this product is a very honest product with very wide appeal," Gabel says of her pizzeria's Chicago style. "And it's a fun product."
Many Bay Area consumers were not acquainted with Chicago-style pizza when Zachary's brought it West. In fact, the small company's director of operations, Frankie Pisciotta, remembers the curiosity he felt the first time he saw a piece of Zachary's pizza.
"I was working at a frozen yogurt shop down the street," he says. "My friend brought in two slices and I had no idea what it was. There was a Peruvian restaurant up the street, and I thought it was Peruvian food, like an appetizer or something. I took it home and had it the next day, cold out of the refrigerator, and the taste was incredible. When I was hired about 3 1/2 months later, I had no concept what Chicago pizza was. When I went in and saw the product out of the oven, I was like 'Oh my God. Gold mine.'"
Others in Oakland apparently felt the same way, because Zachary's, despite never advertising, has been busy for 19 years, an impressive feat for any restaurant concept anywhere.
"We have our own niche," Zachowski explains. "We're on a street that's zoned for small mom and pop places, so there are no chains that can come in. We're a local, community business, and we're a niche player in a niche area."
Zoning laws that favor small businesses certainly help, but Zachary's general manager J.P. LaRussa says the restaurant's pizza speaks for itself.
"People come for the pizza. That's the bottom line," he says. "That's the reason they're going to come tomorrow, or a year from now, and it's the reason they came last week. The pizza that they got last week is the same pizza they're going to get two days from now, and they know that."
Gabel says there are other factors as well.
"You know how you can feel a good buzz of energy in a place, or the opposite? You feel a good buzz here," she says. "I think that's a trickle down. If our crew is having a good time, and it's possible to work really hard and have a lot of fun at the same time, that pervades the dining room. You can feel that energy, and people want to be around that energy. You better have a consistently good product, but our crew is great.
"I think people also can tell that our crew tries really hard to serve them quickly and efficiently. I hate going to a place where they've got two or three people at a counter standing around when they could be doing something else for somebody. The customer senses that they're being taken care of."
It's LaRussa's job to make sure the Zachary's crew keeps the customers happy. It's also up to him to make sure the employees are happy, something he says is easy.
"There's a real integrity that's involved," he says. "It starts right at the top and it flows down, and I think that's why people stay here. There's hope here and there's real opportunity here."
LaRussa, who has been with the company from day one (he started working at Zachary's in high school ) says Zachowski and Gabel are model owners.
"I remember the first day they stood up and they said 'We're going to make a go of this, we believe in the product, and we think we're going to have fun,'" he says. "That was 19 years ago. They said 'If we make money, then you guys are going to make money.' But money is not the only thing that keeps employees happy. When you have bosses who do what they say they're going to do, I think that's a big part of the success."
Let Others Do the Work
A good marketing plan can increase a business' bottom line by leaps and bounds, but Zachowski and Gabel say they've never needed one thanks to their prime location and food quality. If they give the customer a memorable pizza and attentive service, they say, their patrons will do the advertising for them.
"From the very beginning, we've always said that we'll never discount our pizza and that if we do things right we won't have to advertise, that word of mouth will take care of it," explains Gabel. "So if we hire a really great staff and make a consistently good pizza, consistent being the key here, word of mouth should take care of you, theoretically."
In Zachary's case, customers aren't the only ones doing the talking. Critics often praise the pizzeria as well, which has a list of "Best Of" awards that would make any restaurant operator jealous. Most of the awards are on display in the pizzeria, along with the locally produced art Gabel uses to add ambience. Zachary's certainly uses the awards for in-store marketing and touts them on its Web site, but the pizzeria's namesake insists you'll never find he or his wife saying their pizza is better than the competition's.
"I've never said it was better than pizza from other places," Zachowski says. "We win a lot of reader's polls and things like that. Other people say that, but I've never said that and I don't think I ever will say that."
Zachary's also will never deliver, say the owners. There's no need to: they're busy enough without adding the headaches associated with delivery. Besides, Chicago-style pizza doesn't deliver well.
" (Delivery) is another thing we said we'll never do. If we can't do it well we don't want to do it," Gabel says. "Plus, that's a whole other branch of business. It's apples and oranges. It's a fruit, but it's a different fruit. There are other people doing that. They can service that part of the market, and we'll do something else." | 
