Building a Brick-Oven Dream in Seattle
Food writer Molly Wizenberg talks to Inc. about the trials and rewards of opening a pizza shop with her husband.
Gabriel Boone Photography
Gabriel Boone Photography
Gabriel Boone Photography
If you're a serious foodie, you know the name Molly Wizenberg. She's a Seattle-based food writer who is perhaps best known for her blog, Orangette, where she takes a friendly, conversational approach to cooking and exploring food. The Times of London named the site the world's best food blog in 2009. The past couple years have been incredibly, well, fruitful for the Oklahoma City native, who writes a regular column in Bon Appetit, has penned a New York Times bestseller (A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table), and owns a popular pizzeria in Seattle with her husband, Brandon Pettit. Wizenberg recently spoke with Inc.'s Tamara Schweitzer about the highs and lows of starting a restaurant, the entrepreneurial food scene in Seattle, and working alongside her husband.
What first brought you to Seattle?
I moved here almost eight years ago to go to graduate school at the University of Washington. I was studying cultural anthropology and my focus was actually on the French social security system.
But you ended up pursuing a career as a food writer. What was it like switching gears and starting a restaurant?
I never wanted to open a restaurant - it was really my husband's dream. I just sort of helped him midwife it. He's been working in restaurants since he was 15. He's worked both front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house. And for the first two-and-a-half or three years that he was here in Seattle, he worked at a local restaurant called Boat Street Café.
What has it been like working with your husband?
From the very beginning it's been his baby, and I never even planned to work there, because writing is my full-time gig. So really in the beginning I was just sort of a support person to him and as we got closer to opening the place, I realized that he really needed someone who shared his vision to be in there with him. He's very much a perfectionist when it comes to food and design as well, so the whole feel of the restaurant and the quality of the food was something that we have felt very particular about. So about two months before, I jumped on board and I worked in the kitchen for the first four months we were open. But, I'm not a restaurant person so it was never a long-term solution.
Right now, the division of labor is he is in there working the kitchen every day (we're only open five days a week). We've never been open without him being there and I don't think we will be for quite some time. I do a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes a restaurant or a business run smoothly, but that you never really notice. So, I'm making sure that the proper signs are posted for our employees, putting out fires with our employees, I do all the scheduling, I do payroll.
Why a pizza restaurant?
Brandon is originally from northern New Jersey, which is about 20 minutes outside of Manhattan, so he grew up having access to really great pizza. When I met him, he was living on the Upper West Side and going to Brooklyn College and eating a lot of pizza out there. He was pretty obsessed with pizza when he was living in New York, and really he'd been very interested in pizza since he was a kid. He used to put flyers on windshields advertising the local pizza joint where he lived in exchange for getting to sit around and talk to the owners about their pizza and taste their sauces.
When he moved to Seattle there wasn't any pizza here like what he had access to in New York. There's a lot of Neapolitan-style pizza style here now – a huge amount of the pizza places in the city do that style – but there were really only two places that advertised themselves as doing New York-style pies and neither were what Brandon wanted or was familiar with in terms of quality. He had been playing around with making his own pizza for a long time and he finally started doing it. Pizza was always the point, and he wanted to open a restaurant where he could serve the kind of pizza that he wanted to eat.
Ballard, the neighborhood in Northwest Seattle where Delancey is located, could be considered an unconventional choice for opening a new restaurant.
When I first moved here eight years ago, people talked about Ballard like it was the middle of nowhere. I lived in Seattle for six full months before I ever came to Ballard, but when I did, I really liked it. Brandon and I moved to Ballard in June 2006. It's a neighborhood that's part industrial and very residential. It's on the water so there's a lot of the fishing and boating industry and ship repair in the area. But it's also an old Scandinavian neighborhood. So people used to talk about it just being filled with old Scandinavian people.
These days, it's increasingly made up of young families. There are a lot of bungalows; there's a really cute street called Ballard Avenue, where there's a lot of boutique-y shops, and that's where the farmers market is year round. We looked at spaces pretty much all over the city for the restaurant. We had pretty specific criteria in that we needed it to be a single story building otherwise the ventilation for the chimney for the pizza oven would have been too expensive. We had a couple of spaces that Brandon was pretty serious about. Ultimately, we found the space that we are in, which is a mile from our apartment, because a friend of ours lived half a block from there and when he was going to visit our friend, he noticed the For Lease sign outside of the building.
