MASON, OH — Pizzeria Locale's second area restaurant opens Thursday in Warren County.
The fast-casual eatery, located at 9540 Mason Montgomery Road, began its serving custom-made thin crust pizzas at 11 a.m.
The Mason location joins the first Greater Cincinnati Pizzeria Locale, which opened March 13 at 7800 Montgomery Road at the Kenwood Towne Centre.
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Owners Lachlan MacKinnon-Patterson and Bobby Stuckey opened their first Pizzeria Locale 12 years ago as a sit-down, up-scale pizza parlor in Boulder, Colorado. The pair started expanding locations after Chipotle founder Steve Ells, who lived in Colorado at the time, approached them about retooling their dining concept.
With the help of Ellis’ Chipotle, MacKinnon-Patterson and Stuckey recreated their pizzeria as a place where customers walk along a counter and build pies with up to 23 fresh ingredients on preservative-free dough that is made in-house each day.
The pair also spent three years engineering a proprietary brick oven to cook individual thin-crust pizzas within two minutes.
“We need something that hits the sweet spot all the time,” MacKinnon-Patterson said of the Neapolitan-inspired pizza oven, which is equipped with infrared sensors and software to regulate internal temperatures and quickly turn around orders.
The Mason store is the sixth Pizzeria Locale nationwide. Other eateries previously opened in Kansas, Colorado and Missouri.
“It’s not just fast food,” MacKinnon-Patterson said of his restaurant when the Kenwood location first opened. He added that Pizzeria Locale’s mission is to change “how people eat pizza.”
