How California Pizza Kitchen Reinvented One of the World’s Most Iconic Foods | Eater LA
"On Wednesday, March 27, 1985, just before 5 p.m., two former federal prosecutors opened a single restaurant near the intersection of South Beverly Drive and Charleville in Beverly Hills; the very first person to enter was actress Shirley MacLaine, and one of the founders later recalled, “Her agent’s office was right upstairs.” Suzanne Goin, who worked as a hostess at the original location that summer, remembers the early rush and how she would “basically gauge by looking at the person how angry they would be if I told them how long the wait really was, then give them a glass of wine and have them drink on the sidewalk.” Almost immediately the concept took off, prompting rapid expansion and, seven years later, an offer from PepsiCo for a controlling stake. From the start the food played with what pizza could be — examples on the menu included a tangy Thai Chicken Pizza with a sweet peanut sauce, julienned carrots, and crunchy sprouts, and a barbecue-sauce-based, smoky Gouda-topped Barbecue Chicken Pizza — and an early collaboration with Spago’s pizzaiolo Ed LaDou produced opening-menu items featuring lamb sausage, radicchio, pine nuts, grape leaves, pancetta and more. The founders famously decided, “Wait a minute, forget this. Let’s do Spago for the masses,” but quickly learned that “there is no such thing as Spago for masses,” as many of LaDou’s more esoteric pies didn’t land with mainstream customers — except for the Barbecue Chicken, which acted as the hook (roughly 180 of the 200 pizzas sold on opening night were that one pie, and a friend later arrived with 10 people who ordered 10 Barbecue Chicken Pizzas). LaDou worked in the kitchen for about a month before departing and was never a partner; he died in 2008. The founders saw themselves as “defining more than pizza,” and as one put it, “But we were actually defining more than pizza. We were defining a category of upscale, full-service dining,” using well-sourced ingredients, a deviating-from-the-usual menu, and a comfortable dining room at a lower check average than white-tablecloth peers. Strategic mall placements next to retailers like Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus and an early partnership with Steve Wynn — which placed a franchised location inside the Mirage in Las Vegas and exposed the food to international visitors — accelerated awareness. Rapid expansion under PepsiCo led to experiments and cost-cutting that hurt quality (Sullivan notes that thawing frozen zucchini and eggplant “led to moisture problems in the final product”), prompting a return to fresh ingredients and later a period of private-equity ownership, then another ownership change when the founders sold to Golden Gate Capital for a reported $470 million in 2011. That decade-plus after the Great Recession saw slower performance despite menu modernizations (gluten-free and cauliflower crust), and the company filed for bankruptcy in July 2020 carrying more than $400 million in debt. New investors bought the business post-bankruptcy and, under a CEO instated in 2022, refocused growth on franchising and consumer packaged goods — the company now sells about 29 million frozen pizzas a year in grocery stores while serving roughly 20 million restaurant guests annually, a ratio the CEO frames as proof of disproportionate brand recognition (“So, you can draw a power comparison there — it’s huge,” and “Our brand punches well above its weight in terms of brand recognition.”). Throughout the history recounted, employees and long tenures were emphasized as central to success — “There is no way we could have had our success from the beginning if we didn’t have the right people,” one founder says — and the founders’ central culinary credo remains: “Pizza doesn’t have to have tomato sauce on it. That was the whole idea to begin with. That opened up infinite possibilities.”" - Oren Peleg
