The Pivot: Navigating the Transition From Pop-Up to Brick-and-Mortar

By Charlie Pogacar

While a brick-and-mortar pizzeria was once the standard entry point, a new generation of pizza makers are staking their claim via pizza pop-ups. This approach is not only more affordable; it’s also a cost-efficient way to learn whether or not you enjoy making pizza as more than a hobby—and whether you’ve got the skills to do it professionally. Meanwhile, the increasing quality and ubiquity of portable pizza ovens have lowered the bar of entry into the pizza space.

Peyton Smith first entered the pizza game via Forno Moto, a mobile unit that included a Fire Within oven on top of a trailer. He ran Forno Moto for several years prior to opening Mission Pizza Napoletana, an osteria in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that has appeared on 50 Top Pizza’s list of the best U.S.-based pizzerias every year since it debuted.

“The best thing about [starting with a pop-up] was that I learned very cheaply that I really like making pizza for a living,” Smith says. “I didn’t have to spend a quarter- to a half-million dollars to learn that I don’t like it. I mean, how much would that suck?”

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Planting Your Feet On Firm Ground

Pizza pop-ups can also be an inexpensive way of establishing brand recognition. Domenick Calise founded Bucky’s Pizza in Chatham, New Jersey, after he was laid off from his job in talent acquisition. Further complicating matters, he and his wife were about to welcome their first child. A pizza making hobbyist, Calise decided to launch Bucky’s as a pop-up and quickly found success. The concept was regularly booking several gigs per week as Calise began eyeing potential space to call his own.

“Looking back, I wanted to go straight into a brick-and-mortar,” Calise says. “But, if I’m being honest, I think the smart move for us was to do the pop-up first, just because it gave us an opportunity to build a following.”

For Miriam Weiskind, founder of The Za Report, not only did running pop-ups early in the pandemic help establish brand recognition—it also helped her figure out where she wanted to open a physical pizzeria. Weiskind split time doing pop-ups between New York City and Portland, Oregon. She quickly found that, while she made a lot more money at the pop-ups in New York, there was less competition in the Pacific Northwest and, thus, more demand for her neo-Neapolitan pies. Weiskind is scheduled to open up Yum’s of PDX, her first brick-and-mortar location, this spring.

“It would have cost me well over $1 million to open a pizzeria in New York City,” Weiskind says. “And there, it’s a game of selling as much pizza as possible to survive. [In Portland,] I could really focus on the quality of my product and getting a firm foundation so that, if I want to open up another one or two more [locations], I have firm ground under my feet to do so.”

“It would have cost me well over $1 million to open a pizzeria in New York City. And there, it’s a game of selling as much pizza as possible to survive.”
—Miriam Weiskind, The Za Report

But pop-ups have their downsides, too. For one thing, booking events can become a full-time job in its own right. With a pop-up, you’re also often at least partially relying on another partner business to bring in the foot traffic—and the weather is a factor that’s always beyond your control. Plus, the revenue you make at a pop-up is often severely limited.

“I think often we all get too fixated on the top line,” Smith says. “What really matters is the bottom line…but, with that said, the opportunity for top-line revenue in a brick-and-mortar versus the opportunity for top-line revenue at a pop-up—those things are not even remotely on the same planet. From the [number] of days you can operate to how much you can feed somebody, it’s [exponentially different].”

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Finding the Money

One of the biggest challenges of pivoting from a pop-up to a brick-and-mortar, of course, is funding. Even for a high-profile pizzaiola like Weiskind—who has nearly 23,000 followers on Instagram and appeared on the Food Network’s Chopped—raising capital can be a challenge. In fact, Weiskind heard 103 nos from investors before she got one to say yes. In all, only a handful of the 115-plus people she pitched agreed to be silent investors in Yum’s of PDX. In total, about a half-dozen investors will combine to own 18% of her business.

Perhaps one of the reasons Weiskind kept getting turned down was her unconventional pitch to investors. She recalls, “I told them, ‘This is not about building your portfolio to make a lot of money. This is about building your portfolio [in a way] where you’re helping someone build their beautiful dream restaurant in Portland, and [as for] the money, you’ll be paid back in three years. So you’re not losing money, and the profit you make from this each year will be the money you use to buy Christmas gifts for your kids.’”

But appealing to their sense of altruism helped assure Weiskind that the investors were aligned with her vision rather than simply sniffing around for a way to make some easy money. In fact, she memorably turned down one investor who was willing to write a large check because they saw the makings of a chain and wanted to own the pizzeria’s intellectual property.

“I’m not here to get rich,” Weiskind said. “I’m here to bring wealth to the community. Sure, I need money to pay the overhead and to pay my staff, but I want to be a part of this community, because community is everything to me.”

“The opportunity for top-line revenue in a brick-and-mortar versus…a pop-up—those things are not even remotely on the same planet.”
—Peyton Smith, Mission Pizza Napoletana

There’s Always More to Do

There’s another problem to consider if you’re pondering the transition from pop-up to brick and mortar: No matter how much time and money you think it will require, it will probably require more. As Smith explains, everyone—from local permitters to contractors to landlords—are working on their own timeline. Fitting all of the puzzle pieces together requires a lot of politicking, problem-solving, sweaty equity and, perhaps, kind friends.

Calise relied on friends and family to help fund Bucky’s Pizza. But he wasn’t borrowing $1 million—he found an existing pizzeria’s lease available for just $28,000. There were upgrades that needed to be done, but that’s where some manual labor came into play. Calise repainted the restaurant, put in some new floors and revamped the walk-in cooler. In all, it cost about $125,000 to launch Bucky’s Pizza, which opened its doors in October 2024—just over a year after Calise launched his pop-up.

“That process [of redoing the walk-in] took way longer than it needed to,” Calise notes. “I thought it would take about two months to turn around, and it ended up taking more like four months. So I was constantly going back in my head—like, if I had just hired someone to do it and I was able to open in two months instead of four, would I have been better off? But, you know, that’s why hindsight is 20/20.”

Even with all of these challenges, each owner-operator mentioned here has no doubt that they made—or are in the process of making—the right decision. For Weiskind, the decision was made easier knowing that pop-ups were, in a way, the perfect stepping stone to running her own restaurant.

“I think that, having been in the pop-up scene, one of the greatest attributes of doing pop-ups is that you have to be able to pivot on a dime,” Weiskind says. “You have to be able to pivot and just keep going. I think that’s going to be hugely beneficial in the restaurant setting, even if it’s an entirely different set of circumstances.”   

Charlie Pogacar is PMQ’s senior editor.