The Story
There’s a place on 400 South.
It’s been there longer than most things in this city. Salt Lake has gotten taller and weirder around it. The pizza hasn’t moved.
The Place
You know it when you walk in.
Squat brick building. Gold lettering on the door. A gravel parking lot it shares with a Hires drive-in. Inside: booths that squeak, a waitress who knows the menu by heart, a kitchen you can hear, a dining room that sounds like a dining room is supposed to sound. You sit down. They bring it to you. You pay on the way out.
It’s the place you went after the game. The place your parents took you on Friday. The place where the same song’s been on the speakers since the Carter administration. Salt Lake is full of pizza now. Some of it is very good. None of it has been here for sixty years.
The Pizza
The dough still has to earn the day.
The dough rests overnight and gets hand-rolled the next morning. The sauce is the sauce — tomato, the right amount of spice, the right amount of restraint. The cheese is real mozzarella. Not a blend. Not a substitute. When you pick up a slice, the cheese pulls the way it’s supposed to pull.
The pies come out of the oven hot. The cut is done by hand. The box says Fresh Hot Pizza on the side in gold lettering. It’s not a slogan. It’s the instructions.
A note on Don Hale
The guy who started it.
Litzas exists because Don Hale couldn’t find pizza he liked in Utah in the early sixties. He already ran Hires Big H, the hamburger drive-in next door (since 1959, also still going). He didn’t need another restaurant. He just wanted a real slice in his own town. So he drove around the West for a couple of summers tasting every pie he could find, came home with notebooks full of recipes, and built one. He picked a name with a Z in it because he thought it sounded solid. He was right about both things.
Don passed on. The recipes didn’t. He and his son Mark wrote a book about it called Opportunity Knocks Twice, if you’re curious. Otherwise that’s the whole Don story. The rest is the pizza.
Today
Same family. Same crew. Same pizza.
The Hale family still runs both places. A lot of the kitchen and floor crew has been here longer than most marriages last — some of them remember Don himself working a Friday rush. When you walk in on a Friday night you’ll wait a few minutes. The line is part of it.
You can get a Litzas pizza and a Hires burger from the same parking lot. Most people do.
