Story by Brian Hernandez | Photos courtesy of Pizza Mia
Dave Dombrowski, owner of the two-store Pizza Mia in Chicagoland and the latest guest on Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast, didn’t get into the pizza business because it looked glamorous. He just started young, kept learning and never really left. Now he’s celebrating the 35th anniversary of a brand that seemed very much like a long shot when he first started out.
His first pizza job came at 14 in Oak Forest, Illinois, at a carryout-and-delivery shop called Eat a Pizza. He stayed with it a while, moved on to another store in Oak Lawn and was managing that shop while he was still in high school. By 19, he had the chance to take over a closed pizzeria near his house in 1991—and that was the beginning of Pizza Mia. Well, the new and improved version, that is.
The catch was that the shop already had a name and a reputation—and the latter wasn’t so great. But Dombrowski was short on cash. He had saved about $10,000, sold a nicer car, downgraded to a Volkswagen and took over the loan on the equipment. That got him into the business, but not exactly with a clean slate. “I didn’t have enough money to really change the name,” he told Peel. “I didn’t really even think about changing the name. I just wanted to get in there and try being a pizza owner.”
Looking back, he admits, “I didn’t really think about the negative impact of a bad reputation or how hard that would be [to overcome]. I thought I knew everything, but I didn’t know a lot at all.” But the situation was what it was, and he had to deal with it. “It was like an arranged marriage.”
Blunt-Force Local Marketing
Dombrowski, still in his teens and brimming with the confidence of youth, was convinced he could make it work, even if he didn’t fully understand what he was walking into. He was running a store with a name that customers already knew—and not always for the right reasons. So he did what independent operators have always done when they’re short on capital: He hustled. Boy, did he ever hustle.
He dropped menus door to door. He started a direct mail program. He even made cold calls out of the phone book. We mean that literally: Actual cold calls to total strangers. “I would literally open up that phone book, go through, make at least 10 cold calls,” he said.
Then came the pitch: “Hey, this is Dave calling from Pizza Mia on 159th Street. You ever eat our pizza before?” Most people said no, but sometimes the response was: “Yeah, it sucked.”
Dombrowski laughs now when he reflects on it, but there was nothing funny about it at the time. He kept making the calls anyway because it gave him a target. “I wanted to get five sales for the next night,” he said. “At least then I’m coming in and I know I’ve got at least five orders before I even unlock the door.”
It was fearless blunt-force local marketing, the kind that feels almost prehistoric now (when was the last time you saw a phone book?). But for a young operator trying to outrun a bad reputation, it was practical and immediate.
‘What the Hell’s a Chicken Doing Here?’
One of Dombrowski’s smartest early pivots was adding broasted chicken to the menu. It sounds random until you hear him explain it. The problem was still the Pizza Mia name; some customers remained hesitant to give the brand’s pizza another shot because of what had come before him. Chicken gave them another way in.
“People were starting to try the chicken just because they thought, ‘Well, the old pizza sucked, but let’s try the chicken out,’” Dombrowski said. “So now they were coming in and getting chicken, and, ‘Wow, the chicken’s really good. Maybe I’ll try that pizza again.’ I would tell people, if the Colonel (of KFC fame) had my recipe, he’d be a general.”
That same logic led to one of the stranger and shrewder marketing plays of his early years, inspired by the San Diego Padres’ mascot, the San Diego Chicken. Dombrowski found a local costume shop, rented a chicken suit and started putting it to work. One of his employees would wear it to the train station and hand out flyers. And who doesn’t want to hear what a man-sized chicken has to say? “Now people are approaching the chicken instead of just avoiding the guy standing there with flyers,” Dombrowski said.
“That chicken costume was huge,” he adds. “He would just show up in random places in Oak Forest, at different events, parades…People would be, like, ‘What the hell is a chicken doing here?’ It was just kind of quirky, but it was popular and it stirred up interest.”
Dombrowski rented the suit so often that the shop owner eventually told him to just keep it. “And then that chicken costume was mine.”
The Ray Clay Play
Then came the Ray Clay commercial, which feels almost too perfectly Chicago to be real, except it is. Dombrowski opened Pizza Mia in 1991, just as the Bulls were becoming the Bulls. He was reading the Chicago Tribune one day and saw a feature on Clay, the public-address announcer whose voice would become inseparable from the Bulls in that era. Dombrowski tracked him down, called him and asked if he would do a commercial for Pizza Mia. Clay said yes. The price was $375, and only because Clay belonged to a union and was required to charge that minimum. Announcer union—who knew?
“I met him out at this studio in Warrenville, Illinois, and I had a script lined up for him,” Dombrowski said. “He read the script one time, and then he ran through it again. We recorded it, and that was it.” The commercial ran during Bulls games on local cable, and for Pizza Mia, it hit exactly when it needed to. “That right there was huge for us,” he said. “That was probably the biggest turning point for me in Oak Forest.”
‘Be Wary of Franchisees Named Bob’
The business grew from there. In 1993, Dombrowski bought another pizza place in Homer Glen, closed it, remodeled it, renamed it Pizza Mia and reopened it that spring. “It was a gold mine from day one,” he said. He later sold the Oak Forest store, focused on Homer Glen and eventually opened the New Lenox location in 2006. He also tried franchising, with mixed results, and came away from that experience with a pretty simple conclusion: The system matters, but the operator matters more.
“The biggest thing I came across was just finding the right guy who wanted to do that kind of work every day and then to have enough money to get going,” he said. “You are either in it or you’re not.” That’s a fair summary not just of franchising, but of the independent pizza business in general. There is no halfway version of it that works for very long.
He also notes, “Be wary of franchisees named Bob. Both of mine were named Bob.”
Asked what has kept him doing it for 35 years, Dombrowski does not overcomplicate the answer. “I honestly love what I do,” he said. “When you love what you do, it’s not a job.” That doesn’t mean it has been easy. He’s quick to point out the stress, the ups and downs and the long-term commitment the business demands. But he still talks like someone who would choose it again.
He also talks like someone who understands what a pizza shop can mean in a community. He has watched employees come through the business and apply the lessons learned there for the rest of their lives. Customers return week after week, year after year, until Pizza Mia becomes part of their routine. “It’s fun seeing all these customers come back that have been eating your stuff for 25 years every Friday night,” he said. “You’re part of their lives.”
And because he’s from Chicagoland, Dombrowski also has thoughts about the phrase “tavern style.” Specifically, he hates it. Or at least he hates the way it gets used now, as if somebody just discovered thin-crust pizza and needed to rename it for the internet. “Nobody that lives around here is calling me up and saying, ‘Yeah, give me the tavern-style,’” he said. “They’d look at you like, what are you talking about? It’s thin-crust pizza.”
In other words, Dave Dombrowski is not selling mythology. He’s not dressing up ordinary work to make it sound more important than it is. He built Pizza Mia the way a lot of independents built their shops: with repetition, instinct, risk, creativity, long days and whatever idea might get one more customer through the door. Some of those ideas were weird. Some were smart. A few were both. Thirty-five years later, they still add up to a business that has lasted.
Brian Hernandez is PMQ’s associate editor and coordinator of PMQ’s U.S. Pizza Team.
