Old Greg’s Pizza is a lockdown success story that just about broke the internet

This is one of those stories about people who used ingenuity to make it out of the lockdown without losing everything. In fact, it just might be Miami’s most successful tale of triumph in the dark days of 2020. It’s the tale of Old Greg’s, something you might have lusted after on Instagram and if you were lucky, scored a rare slice.

Back in March, Greg Tetzner and girlfriend Jackie Richie had plans for a pop-up pizza place in Wynwood. They’d always imagined long lines of people waiting for their pies, but suddenly long lines were to be avoided.

They had already bought ingredients, and 29-year-old Tetzner had spent years at that point perfecting his pizza. So, they started baking pies for friends and family. Within a few short weeks, they had reservations for pizzas a month in advance, hired 13 employees, and began planning a couple locations around town.

Cutting Into the Story

How’d it happen in these crazy days we live in? It started three years ago when Tetzner took a vacation to New York City. He turned a corner on the Lower East Side, and a scent hit him. “It smelled like a truck of flour had crashed.” In front of him was the esteemed pizza place Scarr’s, which mills its own flour in the basement, something that got Tetzner thinking about creating his own specialty dough.

Tetzner had worked in the kitchen at Michael’s Genuine and then ran the bread program for a couple years at Ghee before heading over to the wildly popular El Bagel. But at Scarr’s, he felt that he had found his calling, and he returned to Miami with a mission to perfect a pizza dough.

What he came up with is something unique, a square pie that combines the best of Roman, Sicilian and American sheet pan pizzas. In an era when Neapolitan shops skimp on toppings, he loads his with ingredients piled high on a crust that’s thick and airy. He called his pop-up Old Greg’s, the nickname fellow line cooks had given him, and the name he gave to his prized sourdough starter that makes the dough so fluffy.

The Other Half of the Pie

Richie, meanwhile, had spent years in marking, working on massive events during Miami Music Week, before opening a marketing outfit of her own. When Tetzner, her boyfriend of seven years, announced in October that his dough was finally ready for the public, she began the brand-building process and devised a marketing strategy.

In those early days back in March, they produced pizzas for friends and family, hoping just for feedback. Those friends and family posted the pizzas on Instagram, and overnight, it was like every single person in Miami wanted one. “We were just doing it to stay ahead and pay rent, you know?” Tetzner says.

Within a month, their Instagram page grew from 200 to 5,000 followers. Richie created a spreadsheet sign-up and used a gameshow-style spinning wheel to pick 15 random winners a week, a pizza lottery that just upped the interest. It was the beginning of the stay-at-home mandates, and maybe those handsome square pizzas were just what Miami needed. “People kept telling us that it was the only thing they had to look forward to during lockdown,” Richie says.

A New Home for Old Greg

Top Miami chef Brad Kilgore reached out and asked if he could reserve a pizza for his birthday. Next thing you know Tetzner had arranged to use the kitchen at Kilgore’s Japanese speakeasy Kaido in the Design District. It didn’t have a pizza oven, but it helped to up Tetzner’s pie-making to 92 a day.

To increase that number, they began shopping for an Old Greg’s brick-and-mortar location, maybe two. The goal for that first one: 700 pies a day. Will that meet the demand for Old Greg’s? Maybe.

Tetzner says pizza-making doesn’t allow him the time to ponder his newly found success. He’s been doing 15-hour days since this began in March and hasn’t taken a day off yet. “It’s all a blur now,” he says. “I really haven’t thought about how big it’s gotten. I hope to stop and think about it sometime. Hopefully that’s going to happen soon.” oldgregspizza.com

This story was originally published November 7, 2020 at 12:00 AM.