‘Take-and-bake’ expands <br>on gourmet pizza trend

After you pick out the toppings for your gourmet pizza – hot & spicy Italian sauce, mozzarella and feta cheeses, grilled chicken breast, fresh spinach, maybe a few banana peppers – somebody at the pizzeria lays it all out on pizza dough. But then, at a few Rhode Island restaurants, something strange happens.
Instead of the restaurant baking and serving it, the uncooked pizza gets wrapped up and you take it home.
“Say you come in for lunch, and you want to have pizza for dinner. Then you just take it home with you and bake it later,” said Tony Oliveira, owner of a Figaro’s Pizza, which is poised to open this week on Newport Avenue in Rumford.
Oliveira’s store, a franchise of one of the nation’s largest “take-and-bake” pizzerias, is part of a growing trend that started in the 1980s.
Oliveira is hoping that his more than $300,000 investment to open one Figaro’s franchise will pay off. If it does, he’d like to open at least three more in Rhode Island, which would fit within Figaro’s goal to open 10 franchises in the state by 2010.
“This is a trial basis, to see how well we do – I’m hoping it will take off after they try our products,” said Oliveira.
Although this is the first national take-and-bake chain to hit the Rhode Island market, it’s not the first such business for the Ocean State. Gourmet Take & Bake, on Hope Street in Providence, offers take-and-bake pizza, and in East Greenwich, Sandy Haynes has been running Sandonna’s Take n Bake for five years.
“We started a few years ago, and we were the first to come into this area,” said Haynes, who started the business with her husband and also owns Sandonna’s locations in Florida and Georgia.
It’s the type of business that brings repeat customers. “The people who do get it, they love it because it’s fresh and they can cook it at their own convenience,” she said. But without the right location, take-and-bake businesses could suffer. The only problem with Sandonna’s location at 333 Main St., she said, is parking along the town’s main drag.
But, Haynes said, repeat customers have a favorite: the “Bring it on Home” pie, which, for $16, comes packed with pesto, gorgonzola cheese, chicken, banana peppers and artichoke hearts. That’s the high side of Sandonna’s prices, which bottom out at $7 for a small cheese.
Dave Goulart, owner of Gourmet Take & Bake, also said location is important for a take-and-bake business. When Gourmet opened its doors three years ago, Goulart wanted to make a difference in the way customers viewed pizza, and now residents of Providence’s East Side and along Blackstone Boulevard have caught on, he said.
“I think there’s a really core group of foodies – people who really love good food – who realized that take and bake can be, and is, better,” said Goulart.
Oliveira said that he looked at other chains – not just take-and-bake, but others including Domino’s Pizza and Pizza Hut – before deciding on the take-and-bake franchise.
“We looked at all the chains and we wanted something high quality,” he said. “We were looking for something good, something I would want to eat.”