Despite heaps of critical acclaim, Elro Pizza and Crudo, which opened in Houston in June 2023, hasn’t mustered the traffic and revenue that founder Terrence Gallivan needed to keep the doors open. Worse yet, Elro is one of several independent pizza shops around the U.S. to close down permanently in December. So far.
Gallivan announced in a December 11 Instagram post that Elro will close at the end of the month.
The Houston Chronicle named Elro to its Top 100 Restaurants list for the second straight year in October. Food critic Alison Cooke called it “a magical world” with “thoughtful” sourdough pies.
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“And what sourdough it is, pizza fans,” Cooke wrote. “It puffs high at the crown, singes properly on the bubbles and stretches satisfyingly at each bite, with just the right balance of salt and tartness. It’s so good that on each of my visits, I ended up scarfing my ‘pizza bones,’ as the crust rims are known, to the last bite.”
But Elro, a two-time James Beard Award nominee, told CultureMap Houston that the restaurant had experienced “a heavy decline in business for many months.” That’s despite efforts to build up customer interest with non-pizza events that focused on steaks and fried chicken.
“I think most people in this business will try to hang on as long as they can, and that’s kind of the story with Elro,” Gallivan added in a Houston Chronicle interview. “We tried to keep it going as long as we could, but the fall is typically the busy season, and we have not been busy.”
There has been a worrisome flurry of independent pizzeria closures around the country in recent weeks. Among them: Radius Pizzeria and Pub in Hillsborough, North Carolina, which will close on December 29 after 11 years under the ownership of Kate and Mick Carroll; Lucia’s Two Go in Rotterdam, New York; Pleasant Pizza, operating in Willimantic, Connecticut, since 1994; and the 60-year-old D&G Pizza in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
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According to a Facebook post, D&G owner Ken Levato was ready to retire after losing his father earlier this year. But, not surprisingly, high operational costs and labor issues seemed to the culprit for other pizzerias that couldn’t hang on.
Yellow Moto Pizza in San Francisco was named one of 50 Top Pizza’s best pizzerias in the U.S. last year. Nevertheless, owner David White, a former partner in San Francisco’s Flour + Water, had to shut his three-year-old pizzeria down on December 7.
“We have done our absolute best to make it work but have not been able to overcome the headwinds of the last few years,” White wrote in a November 30 post on Instagram.
In an interview with SFGate, White said Yellow Moto’s revenue was down 50% from 2022. “We lost so much money over the past three years, and we’re losing about $5,000 a week this year,” he said. “It’s bizarre, right?”
White added, “If we were to charge what we should charge for the business to be viable, it would be a $40 pizza. And people are already sensitive to it being $20 [or] $22.”
As for Lucia’s Two Go, owner Paul Corradi wrote in a recent Facebook post, “As many of you are aware, the past few years have been very challenging. Since the devastating loss of my business partner and best friend and the constant struggle to find the amount of help needed to produce and provide the standard of food that we have become noted for, I have come to the difficult realization that it is time for me to make a notable change.”
The loss of Pleasant Pizza—which was taken over by new owners earlier this year—came as a hard blow to the Willimantic community. The pizzeria’s December 8 post on Facebook attributed the closure to “rising costs and health issues.” That post garnered 758 reactions, 202 comments and 192 shares.
Related: Matt Plapp’s 3-2-1 strategy: How to gain massive attention for your pizzeria
If your pizzeria is struggling, what are you doing to promote it, and what are you not doing? Do you have a strong, well-organized website with online ordering, a substantive “About Us” page that tells your personal story, photos of your menu items, a text-based menu (instead of a PDF), and behind-the-scenes video to grab attention? If not, why not?
Do you actively engage with your customers on key social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram? As restaurant industry consultant Matt Plapp recently wrote for PMQ, traditional word-of-mouth has been replaced with social media in the 2020s. If you’re not there, you’re nowhere.
Do you offer a loyalty program, and are you promoting it on your website? Have you been collecting and making frequent use of customer data for marketing purposes? Are you emailing and texting your best customers with attractive, high-value offers that keep your pizzeria top-of-mind?
Related: Stop renting customers’ attention: How to build loyalty with a robust marketing database
If you’re only doing some of that, or, worse, none of it, think of 2025 as a re-set year. As Plapp stated, “Your independent pizzeria and national brands have exactly the same opportunity; in fact, there’s no reason you can’t move ahead of them, since you are more nimble. You don’t need a board meeting to change your marketing; you just need to take action.”
For pizzeria owners, operators and managers who know how to make great pizza but struggle on the marketing side, Plapp has been teaching a virtual master class on that very topic on PMQ.com. Click here to read his ongoing series of articles.
Update: On Friday, December 13, another independent pizzeria, Sabatini Restaurant and Pizzeria in Westborough, Massachusetts, suddenly closed its doors. The MetroWest Daily News reported that the pizzeria, which had been in business for four-and-a-half decades, posted a sign on its door announcing the closure. It read, “Closed…thank you all for 45 years! We will miss you all very much.” No explanation for the decision was provided other than, perhaps, an added note in one corner of the sign that read, “Special thanks to the Biden administration!” Sabatini had no apparent presence on social media, and it’s unclear whether it had its own website.
