Wickenden Street location.
Company: Pizza Pie-er
Owner: Bahman Jalili
Location: 374 Wickenden St., Providence
Employees: 25
Founded: 1987
Type of business: Pizza take-out and delivery
Annual revenue: More than $1 million
Studies conducted by vast pizza conglomerates have offered up the following
observations: Men wearing muscle shirts when answering the door order pepperoni
on their pizza three times more often than any other topping. People who have
pierced noses, lips or eyebrows ask for vegetarian toppings 23 percent more
often than a meat topping. Those who have wind chimes on the porch are four
times more likely than the average to want olives.
Pizza, it turns out, is a cultural barometer – what people like on top of their pizza tells us a lot about their tastes in general, not just their taste buds.
So it should come as no surprise that so many pizza eaters who attend Providence’s Brown University, so many pierced and tattooed artist-types who live in the city’s Bohemian Fox Point neighborhood, and so many cultured yuppies who call the East Side home, get their pizza from Pizza Pie-er.
Of all the pizza joints in the Brown University-Fox Point-East Side vicinity, Pizza Pie-er’s gourmet treatment of the genre has made it an institution for the myriad affluent, intellectual and artsy types that inhabit that corner of the city. The company’s success in the pizza-order business offers a case study for how a business can thrive by identifying and occupying an upscale niche in a lowbrow industry.
Pizza Pie-er even has a Web site where customers can build their own pizzas and place the orders online – and read some pizza trivia while waiting for confirmation of their order. In fact, the Pizza Pie-er Web site is where the trivia at the top of this story came from.
But speaking of the top, let’s talk about what’s at the top of pizzas from Pizza Pie-er: roasted peppers and eggplant, Cajun chicken, herbed shrimp, asparagus, Italian prosciutto, marinated artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes. That’s just a sampling. And the choices don’t end with the toppings – Pizza Pie-er will make any of its pizzas with one of nine homemade sauces, including puttanesca, cilantro pesto, walnut and alfredo. All are served on white, wheat or seven-grain crust.
“There’s a lot of competition for pizza in Providence like for everyone else, but I mean, nobody I have to worry about. Nobody’s doing what we do. We have our own market niche. We do delivery like Dominoes, but our pizza is a balanced meal. It has the right amount of carbohydrates, good protein, and we use organic flour and low-fat cheese,” said Bahman Jalili, the founder and owner of Pizza Pie-er.
Jalili, a Cranston resident, opened Pizza Pie-er on the East end of Wickenden Street in 1987, a year after earning an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Roger Williams University. Even before he got his diploma, Jalili knew that a career in engineering wasn’t in the cards. Through several years of working at fast-food joints to pay for school, Jalili had learned the business, learned that he had what it took to be a success in that industry, learned that pushing pizza could be lucrative.
Fox Point was not a gourmet-pizza type of neighborhood when Jalili opened the doors to his new business. But Jalili was shrewd enough to see that there was an untapped market for fancy pizza just up the block at Brown University, and he caught the wave a few years later when Fox Point gentrified around him.
“I knew there was a demand for gourmet pizza. That’s just how we started – we saw the market,” said Jalili, a diminutive man with an open, exuberant manner.
Pizza Pie-er is open seven days a week, from 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. – and until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. A 16-inch pizza from Pizza Pie-er ranges from $11 to almost $20, and the business sells several hundred pizzas a day, said Jalili. On a Friday night, Jalili estimated his crew of headset-wearing workers moves pizzas at a clip of 100 an hour.
Pizza Pie-er has won so many “Best Pizza” and “People’s Choice” awards that it’s been retired to the hall of fame by journals like the Providence Phoenix and Rhode Island Monthly magazine. Several times, Pizza Pie-er has been named one of the “Top 100” pizza makers in the U.S. by Pizza Today Magazine, the industry’s marquis trade journal.
Every city has its favorite pizza joint. Some are so good they become famous: Unos in Chicago. Ray’s Famous Original in New York. Well, Jalili wants Pizza Pie-er to be next. He franchised the company last August, selling the first Pizza Pie-er franchise to an entrepreneur who opened the shop on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, next to the Berkley School of Music.
Jalili said that more Pizza Pie-er franchises will open in other states in the next couple of years. But he was hesitant to discuss the franchising strategy of his business, perhaps for fear of seeming out of touch with the community has made Pizza Pie-er such a success.
“We’re going to get big, but we’re not going to leave right here,” said Jalili.
“We’ve been here a long time, we’re well known here, the store does really good,
you know? This is our bread and butter.”
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