Nov. 27, 2020

Pizza di Paolo returns today after an almost four-month absence with new gas ovens that have replaced the original wood-fired one.

“The pizza is just as good,” owner Dennis Napolitano said. “We haven’t changed any ingredients.”

The new ovens, which are lined with pizza stones for baking, will allow the restaurant at 2300 S. Minnesota Ave. to keep up with demand.

“Our other oven would only hold six (pizzas). We’ve got five times the room,” Napolitano said of the Peerless multideck ovens. “We can’t make them fast enough to keep the (new) ovens full.”

The pizzas will take a couple of minutes longer to cook in the gas ovens than the wood-fired one, he said.

“The main reason we chose the oven was so we could produce more pizza because we couldn’t keep up during the busy times. This will help. You can’t get rid of all the problems, but this is going to be big – not to mention hauling all of the wood all the time,” he said, laughing.

“It’s not like we’re a restaurant, and we can make a pizza for (just) you. That’s all we sell, so we’ve got to be able to make a lot of pizzas, so this is going to help us out.”

Napolitano and his wife, Linda, the parents of Breadico founder David Napolitano, opened the restaurant in October 2019, carrying on David’s pizza-making legacy with his help. They closed the restaurant in August to begin the renovations, and initially hoped to reopen in September. They ran into construction delays, however, and David reopened Breadico in a retail space in October.

Was Napolitano heartbroken to tear down the original wood-fired oven he had built himself?

“Not really. No. I was glad to get rid of it, glad to get rid of it actually,” he said, laughing. “I was tired of it. It was time to go.”

Napolitano was able to salvage most of the forest-green brick that covered the front of the wood-fired oven and reuse it for visual interest on the walls.

As part of the remodeling, he also expanded the size of the open kitchen to give the pizza-makers more room.

Reduced hours because of winter and the pandemic will be 4 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. The restaurant is open for dine-in, carryout or curbside pickup.

“We’re not going to do deliveries just yet,” he said, noting that it’s coming. “We have to find the people to do it.”