Oct. 22, 2020

A New York-style pizza kitchen from the owners of Bread & Circus Sandwich Kitchen is coming to downtown Sioux Falls.

Pizza Cheeks — think your mouth stuffed with food — will be in the back end of The Hello Hi, a bar at 120 S. Phillips Ave. that’s expected to open soon.

“We’re calling it more of like a pizza window,” said Barry Putzke, who owns the ventures with chef Jordan Taylor. “We have a little 4-foot space in the back where we’ll have a deli case that you order from, but there’ll be whole pies in there that you can get by the slice. So we’ll have pizza by the slice plus whole pies, a few different sides and salads.”

An opening date also hasn’t been set for Pizza Cheeks.

“We are probably a couple of weeks behind them because we want to give ourselves a good couple of weeks of recipe testing,” Putzke said.

He and Taylor convinced a friend from their years in the Northwest, Michael Charpentier, to move here and serve as chef de cuisine. He’ll run the kitchen and is assisting executive chef Taylor in creating the recipes for the 18-inch pies with a thinner crust that will make for foldable slices.

They’ve invested in a Swedish-made oven called the Pizza Master that will allow the kitchen crew to bake items like Bread & Circus’ cookies at 350 degrees and pizzas at up to 900 degrees.

For slices to go, the case likely will be stocked with four options: cheese, pepperoni, vegetarian and specialty. Each slice will be reheated in a quick toaster oven.

“Traditionally, like a New York-style slice shop would, (we’ll) throw it in there, toast it up and make sure it’s as fresh as we can get it. Even though we’ve pre-made it, it’s not going to be very old,” Charpentier said. “It’s going to be fresh and hot.”

For whole pizzas, there will be a half-dozen specialty pies and a “robust build-your-own option as well,” Putzke said. There also will be a gluten-free crust.

Pizza Cheeks diners will find the same attention to quality of ingredients and creative recipes as Bread & Circus, which opened at 600 N. Main Ave. three years ago when the Sioux Falls natives returned with their families to replant their roots.

“Everything’s going to be still in the same vein as here,” Taylor said. “Like we’re doing everything in-house, but we’re not going to make the pepperoni, and we’re obviously not going to make the cheese, but there’ll be braised meats that are options for toppings … and meatballs. We’re making as much as we can.”

Carryout and delivery will be available, and those options will allow the kitchen to keep running even if the pandemic worsens, Putzke said.

Pizza Cheeks likely will open in late afternoon when the bar does and will offer a full menu until 10 p.m. or so and then switch to by-the-slice-only pizza for late night.

The team is excited about the partnership with The Hello Hi, they said.

“Hopefully, it takes off, and the product does well, and we can build the brand, build the product,” Putzke said. “And eventually, when the right space opens up, we can, you know, not just have a pizza window at The Hello Hi, but we can have a full-scale, family-friendly pizzeria somewhere else downtown where we can really flex our creative muscles and crank out a bunch of sides, a bunch of appetizers, a bunch of different pizzas and serve a bigger group of the community.”