Staying power: what 60 years in pizza has taught us
A friend of ours runs a small consulting firm and likes to say that the businesses that last aren't the ones that did the most things, they're the ones that decided what they were and refused to do anything else. We think about that a lot in pizza.
Don Hale opened Litzas in 1965 with a particular idea about what a pizza should be: hand-tossed, medium crust, real cheese, sauce made the same morning, ingredients you could pronounce. He never got bored of that idea. Sixty years later we still make the dough fresh every morning. Still hand-toss it. Still slice the pepperoni in-house. Still buy the seasoned ground beef from the same butcher next door at Hires Big H — which, fair enough, is also a Hale family restaurant.
What we've learned
Recipes don't go out of style. Trends do. We've watched stuffed crust come and go and come back. We've watched cauliflower crust, keto crust, vegan cheese, and a brief, regrettable national interest in dessert pizza. Through all of it, our cheese pizza tasted the same. People kept ordering it.
Speed isn't the same as care. A pizza shop can be fast or it can be careful. The good ones manage both, but if you have to choose, choose careful. People remember a pizza that was worth the wait. They forget the one that was just on time.
The frosted mug matters. We serve our root beer and apple beer in frosted mugs. Always have. It costs us a freezer full of mugs and a small amount of breakage. It is also one of the things customers mention more often than the pizza, because it's the part where you feel like the place actually cares.
Family is the long bet. We're a sister restaurant to Hires Big H. Same Hale family, same standards, same approach to fresh ingredients. When you're a family business, you're not optimizing for next quarter — you're trying to hand off something worth running to the next generation. That changes how you make decisions.
Sixty years in.
The downtown SLC location turned 60 last year. The kitchen has been remodeled, the ovens have been replaced, the menu has grown in spots and shrunk in others. But if Don Hale walked in tomorrow he'd recognize the pizza on his table.
That's the whole game. Come see us — or we'll bring it to you.
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