Opened by Christina Martin in 2021, Manizza’s Pizza is a family-friendly pizzeria in the Spring Valley area of Las Vegas (some 15 minutes from the strip), that cranks out fantastic thin crust, New York inspired pizza, which they currently offer for dine-in, carryout, and delivery.

Manizza’s was the last restaurant added to my Vegas intinerary right before I left for my trip in October — thanks to a hot tip from my buddies Dan at Casazza House and Mike at Mr. B’s — and I’m so grateful that it was.

In addition to learning all about her shop, Christina and I also talked about her unique entry point into the world of pizza (she ran a succesful meal prep company for years first), the wisdom of John Arena (the godfather of Las Vegas pizza), how she met her mentor Mike Bausch, why everyone should celebrate half birthdays, her idea to get an undercover pizza job while she was building out her own space, the reaction when she decided to give out a year’s worth of free pizza when she first opened, and maybe most importantly, why she decided to go after Uber/Uber Eats when she realized someone created an imposter profile using her restaurant’s name and was using it to sell their own food through the app (which has since turned into a class action lawsuit that’s gone to federal court).

Christina has a big personality — which you can see for yourself all over Manizza’s Instagram — and she’s also an unstoppable ball of positive of energy who spoke candidly about the realities of running a pizzeria from a business perspective in a way I haven’t experienced in any of my other interviews so far.

Christina: We’ve been in business here at this location for three years, and before that I had a pizzeria I started for fun that was across town in the same location as a meal prep company that I owned. We did healthy prepared meals, which is the opposite of what we do now — fried food and awesome pizza. We sold that off because I just couldn’t make the footprint make sense, but I told my whole staff don’t get a job for a month and a half, I’ll pay you to not do that, and then they all helped me open over here. It was awesome to open with people who knew what to do, so it wasn’t just like a totally green staff getting clobbered.

CPN: Did you grow up in Vegas?

Christina: I did not. I’m from Kentucky originally. Moved to Louisiana for college. Then South Texas for a while, right by the border, that was scary. I moved out here 13 years ago and I love it. I’ll be here for a while. We’ll always have a home in Vegas, but I don’t know if we’ll always live here full-time.

CPN: You’re putting down some roots.

Christina: I’ve gotten my whole family to move out from Kentucky, and now they’re having babies and doing stuff, so I can’t bail.

CPN: What do you love about pizza?

Christina: It just makes everyone happy. And I love the community. I went and spent time with John Arena yesterday, and he made me a pizza himself, and I was in tears in my car afterward. I don’t even know when he made a pizza last, because his hands are so shaky from his Parkinson’s. When I first got into pizza, I looked at everyone as competition — I just thought that was normal. But then I found that everyone is of the persuasion that we help each other. We want each other to be better. It can be a tough gig, but it’s awesome. And what’s not to love about cheese on bread?

CPN: John’s name comes up all the time, even in Chicago. So many people have told me how much he helped them out.

Christina: He’s got the personality and presence of a monk. He’s so calm, and supportive, and happy. The guys got life figured out. Yesterday I remembered I needed some dough balls — I was already on the freeway and he’s right by my house — so I just stopped by, and he gave me some.

CPN: What do you love about making pizza?

Christina: So I don’t make a lot of our pizzas anymore. I have a team that’s fully capable, and I’m not on the line a lot. I would love to do it more, but I also enjoy my free time. But I love working with my hands and creating something from flour, all the way to what people are nourishing themselves with. There are so many steps in the process that people don’t see, like that long bulk fermentation going on in my office right now. But I just love tactically working with my hands. It brings me joy.

CPN: Do you remember your first favorite pizza?

Christina: Yes, and it was not my own. I made my first pizza at our old location 10 days before we opened our pizzeria. I was just winging it. Like, how hard can it be? I didn’t grow up in pizza. I don’t have this lifelong obsession. I just don’t. My first favorite pizza was in Connecticut, at Grand Apizza in Madison. I ate almost a whole 16-inch pizza to myself, and I could have kept going. It’s just so good. It’s in my top three favorite slices ever.

CPN: New Haven-style?

Christina: Yup. That and I had a slice out of Tony Gemignani’s Slice House, and I’d already had a couple beers, which might have had an influence on it, but that was also a top three slice of my life. It was amazing. And that’s all been in the last couple of years.

CPN: So let’s talk about that first pizza you made…

Christina: It was really cute. I have a photo of it. I used to think I would do a star shaped pepperoni on all of our pepperoni pizzas. I was going to take the time to cut it, and make it part of our logo, but it did not come out the way I thought it was going to look in the oven. When we had the meal prep company, we were doing thousands of meals a day delivered across Las Vegas. It was hyperefficient in that our kitchen was done by 1 or 2 every day, because we were batching everything. So in an effort to kind of use the labor that was still there all night, and to increase sales, we opened the ghost kitchen pizzeria entirely for fun. My chef at the time had owned a pizzeria before the 2008 crash. My manager had run a Domino’s. So I was like, how hard can it be? Let’s see what happens. So I watched my chef make it, and I thought, that’s not so hard. So I remember I tried to stretch my first dough ball, and I was just pulling it like a neanderthal. Just pulling it in a circle. It was a lot harder than I thought. But as that evolved over time, and I learned, I fell in love with the mental memory of how to stretch a pizza. So last night I took John’s dough balls to a friend’s house to make pizza kits for the kids, and I was doing all the stretching, and it just feels so good. It’s comforting. My first pizza was a pepperoni pizza. And it was ugly. And underbaked. And kind of burnt on the bottom at the same time. I didn’t know how we were gonna pull it off, but here we are.

CPN: What made you want to take that further and open your own pizzeria?

Christina: The meal prep company was doing well on its face. Big revenue. Big staff. Big impact on the community. But I was keeping nothing on the back end, and I had no idea what I was doing. So I saw there was a lot of opportunity to leverage my existing kitchen space that we were paying 168 hours a week for when we only needed 50. We brainstormed subleasing the kitchen. Or renting it out to Sally’s Cake Pops or whoever overnight. But then I went to Pizza Expo, kind of on a whim, and I loved it. Sat in Mike Bausch’s seminar — he’s out in Tulsa, and we’ll talk about him more later — and I just realized that the talent I had on my staff all had pizza experience, minus me. But I knew I could learn. You can YouTube anything now. I learned sign language to talk with an employee. I leaned how to grout and tile on YouTube. You can learn a lot on the internet. I thought it was just water, and flour, and the margins should be pretty good, but I didn’t know how much I didn’t know. Our first menu was a little bit of a replica of my first chef’s old pizzeria, but we’ve chopped that up since then. But I learned how to make pizza dough by the scoopful of flour, not be weighing it. Everything was eyeballed, and a nightmare, and inconsistent. But when I started making pizza and saw how happy it made customers, and saw how many more customers we could have, and how it was fun, and happy, and upbeat, I just fell in love with it. At that point, it was 10 percent of our revenue, but it was 100 percent of my energy, and my enthusiasm, and my heart. So while it was hard to part with the 90 percent, that’s a big number, we sold the meal prep company in 2020. It was eating me alive. I was such a cog in the wheel, because my ego was so big that I wanted to be involved in everything. And I knew that wasn’t sustainable. Whereas pizza, I knew I could scale that, or I could delegate that, and still serve so many more people. It was a big leap to sell that off but we’re here, and we’ve got expansion plans — I’d like to get to three to five stores in Vegas in the next few years — and after that I don’t know what the path looks like.

CPN: When did the shop officially open?

Christina: June of 2021. I signed the lease here in September of 2020, like a complete psychopath.

CPN: Did you have to build it all out?

Christina: For the most part. This was a huge restaurant space, and I had only carryout and delivery before. And I don’t want to do a whole lot of dine-in. Like 85% of my business walks right out the door, and I like that. We don’t have a liquor license. But for some reason it all took like nine months. It was a nightmare. And so expensive.

CPN: Do you know what this space was before?

Christina: It was a sushi burrito place. They kindly left me some of their refrigeration, that was turned off, with a bunch of fish inside of it. So I got to clean that out. That was a lot of fun. Summer in Vegas! I had a hazmat suit. It was gross.

CPN: What was the initial response like?

Christina: We had so much build up, and people were waiting so long for us to open. We had the sign on the building in February, and I was told four more weeks of construction, so when that went on for four more months, people were coming every day trying to have lunch. When we grand opened, we did free pizza for a year for the first 100 people in line. It wasn’t unlimited, it was one per month, but still, that’s 1200 pizzas I’m potentially giving away. I gave away about 700 because we didn’t have a full redemption rate from everyone. But we had a line around the block and down Rainbow. People were camping in the parking lot. I pulled in in the morning like, what have I done? It was great, but I had people DMing me all night. It was just big energy. It was a rager for like 6 hours, just getting everyone in and processed. It was a life highlight. Seeing people camping in their cars overnight was nuts. And it’s been like a rocket ship ever since. I’ve had tough times, but in general we’ve been really well received.

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CPN: How would you describe your pizza?

Christina: Crispy. Golden brown. Tiny blisters on the edge. Airy crust. Made with love. I don’t like to put it in a category other than sort of a traditional circle pizza. It’s got so many influences from other people in it. I’ve taken all these things I’ve learned from other people, all these little tidbits, and I’ve just boiled that down to something that can be consistent. I just love having everyone’s hand prints, for lack of a better term, in my product and in my restaurant.

CPN: How long were you working on your dough recipe before you felt like, this is the pizza that we want. We got it.

Christina: So we were open for about a year at Stella’s, it was called Stella’s Pizza after my daughter, and once I sold off the meal prep company it became apparent to me that I was going to have to start measuring out everything. If I wasn’t going to be there 24/7, then I needed to systemize a lot of things. So I dove in head first, and probably after 6-8 months I felt like this is the product I’m looking for. But as I learned more, I’m still leveling up and perfecting things.

CPN: It’s a lifelong pursuit.

Christina: Absolutely. On a large pizza here, there will always be 17 pepperonis…until I change it. I’m obsessed with consistency, because if you come in on a Tuesday and a Friday, I want you to have the exact same experience. To me, that’s so important. But as far as continuing to perfect things, I ate John’s pizza yesterday and I was just staring at the crust and admiring it. And my daughter asked me if I drove all the way to California to get that pizza, because she recognized the crust from when we went to Truly, which Chris Decker runs, but John partly owns. So to see an 8-year-old, who is a pizza snob by default, hold a pizza crust and be like, I recognize this. That’s incredible. I don’t know that we’ll ever be perfected, but we continue to improve on it. And we don’t change anything until we’ve tinkered a lot. I felt like I had an understanding once I really started YouTubing and Googling everything, but I don’t know that I’ll ever be done.

CPN: Was there anyone specific you were paying attention to on YouTube?

Christina: It wasn’t even so much pizza people as it was getting a better understanding on the fermentation process. Sometimes I talk to bakers and they’ll ask about my percentages for this or that and it’s just, I might measure this in grams, that in cups, and this by weight. It’s not a perfect baking system, I’ll own that, but it works. But if I were to troubleshoot something, I would struggle. I’ve had bakers on Instagram ask about my hydration percentage and, it’s somewhere in the 60s. It might vary a little bit. I’m dorky about it, but like…

CPN: There’s a level way beyond dorky.

Christina: Exactly. I just super appreciate the process. You can look at dough and know if it’s right. You can feel it and know.

CPN: Just like stretching. After you’ve done it enough and you get it, you know.

Christina: Which is why we’ve got systems. My whole team doesn’t know how to make dough, but most of them do. They have promotion levels based on the skills they have at work. Once they get to the second tier they’ve really mastered dough, so I trust them to make a batch and I know I don’t have to babysit them.

CPN: Is that where everyone starts? Or do they have to work up to dough?

Christina: They work up to it. They start as a learner. Then move up to pizzaiolo, which means you have a mastery of the line, and the product, and customer service. I have people with a ton of experience, but I still bring them in as a learner, because I want them to understand how we do it. I had an undercover job at (BIG PIZZA COMPANY) for a bit when I was building this location because I wanted to understand how to make it efficient, and I saw that they had a lot of systems in place for consistency. I started as a learner on my first day, even though I owned a pizzeria myself like three blocks away. So I’ve brought in people with tons of hoity-toity pizza experience, but I’m still gonna show them how we do it. It’s important to me that people start as a learner and move up. And that could be two weeks, or two years.

CPN: I’ve never heard of getting an undercover pizza job before!

Christina: I had my facemask on. And my glasses. I went by Chrissy for like a month. It was great. I learned more in four weeks than I did in four years at university. My brain hurt. And there’s so much technology involved. Not that I want to be the next (BIG PIZZA COMPANY), I just wanted to learn how they’re so efficient.

CPN: Especially when you’re talking about running thousands of stores worldwide.

Christina: I had a lot of questions, and no one was gonna talk to me if I called them. So I got a job for a while, and I did a really good job for them! They tried to promote me to general manager after week two and I was like, I’ve infiltrated too far.

CPN: Did anybody ever figure it out? No one ever came up to you like “Hey, Chrissy!” at the grocery store?

Christina: It was during COVID, so I really had like a whole facemask on. I was straight up icognito.

CPN: That’s some legit subterfuge.

Christina: On my second shift I was training new delivery drivers and I was like, this is a crisis. And I’m getting phonecalls from my business that I need to deal with while I’m out on deliveries, goofing around with this big box chain.

CPN: What’s your dough process like?

Christina: We leave our water out for a few days to get it to the temp we want. And I don’t have a water filtration system, so we let all the chlorine and stuff evaporate out. Then we refrigerate it. We’ve got flour, water, sugar, salt, yeast. After we make it it sits in my office for three days in the fridge, ideally. Sometimes we go through it faster than that. Three days in there, then we ball it, then another 1-2 days in the back waiting to get used. So 4-5 days from flour to dough ball. I don’t like to rush that process. We got a Yelp award last year and were underwater and I didn’t have enough capacity for the business we were getting, which is great, but also sad because we were closing at 4 o’clock every day. So I had to buy more refrigeration to keep up. We were having to rush that process, and I don’t want to serve frozen dough balls. I want us to do what we’ve always done. And because it takes so much time we were in hot water, constantly making emergency dough, and crossing our fingers.

CPN: You talk a lot about fermentation, did you experiment with it when you were working on your recipe? What’s the farthest you pushed it?

Christina: Like six or seven days in bulk. And it was fine. But it’s unnecessary. At that point I feel like it just starts to die. I love making sourdough at home. I was messing with kombucha for a little while at my house, but then I had an explosion in one of my pantries. And my husband doesn’t love my science projects coming home. He would prefer they stay here.

CPN: Where did the name Manizza’s come from?

Christina: It’s a family name. So we had Stella’s Pizza, but there’s lots of Stella’s in the restaurant category that are trademarked, so we knew that when we grew that wasn’t going to work out. Manizza is on my grandfather’s side, so it’s just an ode to my family. And it’s spelled like pizza, so it worked out well.

CPN: What do you think is unique about your shop?

Christina: It’s just really frickin’ wholesome in here. You’re not going to hear my team members cussing on the line. You leave feeling, ideally, a lot of purchase pride. Like it feels good to be here. You’re helping the community. The team members that work here are cared about. The pizzas are made with a lot of love and a lot of attention to detail. I try to have that be the thread through everything, happy team members, happy pizza.

CPN: Tell me about the library…

Christina: That’s part of how they get promoted too. They have a certain amount of books they have to read. And they have to write me little book reports, it’s a big deal. Once they read all the books, and master everything behind the line — because you can read all day, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to fast pizza on a Friday — we turn the lights down, and play “Eye of the Tiger” and they have to make a pizza in a certain amount of time to test out to the next level.

CPN: It’s like a gauntlet!

Christina: We’ve had guests catch us doing it. It’s super fun. It’s also ceremonial, and symbolic. You know, it’s 90 seconds from dough ball to oven on a standard large pepperoni pizza. But that helps me systems-wise know that if we burn a pizza at the very last minute, we can get another one from dough ball into the oven in 90 seconds, no excuses. We have time to remake it before that guest shows up, and now it’s taking another 20 minutes. There’s reasons behind all of it. And I personally get really hopped up when I hear “Eye of the Tiger”, so that’s why I chose that song.

CPN: What should someone order their first time?

Christina: It’s a little unconventional, but our Nashville hot chicken pizza is stupid good. I stuck my nose up at it for like six months even though my entire team was like, “We’ve got to do this!” I’m not a ranch based pizza kind of gal. But it’s fantastic. Also the blonde bombshell, which is olive oil and fresh garlic pureed together as the base, with buffalo mozz and light mozzarella. It’s amazing. Or a basic cheese if you’re just trying it out. Then find what you like.

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CPN: There’s a really cool thing that you do, how did the birthday boxes start?

Christina: I want people to leave here obsessed with their purchase pride, the same way like when I walk out of lululemon, I love the things I just bought. I also know that kids really drive decision making around food, and birthdays are profitable endeavors because usually there’s a lot of pizza. So why wouldn’t you draw Paw Patrol inside of that kid’s pizza box? I don’t care if they know me as Manizza’s pizza, I want to be the Paw Patrol pizza that they ask for every single Friday night. And that’s why we have coloring books, and dough for them to play with, and a book exchange. And then the parents can be really happy coming in and knowing their kids is gonna eat a full meal. As a parent myself, there’s nothing worse than taking your kid to a restaurant, and then they just pick at the bread and the whole meal is trashed. So I would always decorate for anyone’s birthday if they asked. But then we partnered with a children’s birthday party place that’s a block away, and they have all their birthday pizza parties contracted through us. So now we’ll get a theme and go really hard on it. I found out the other day we had a little girl and her mom took the top off the pizza box and kept it in her room for a year because it had the Frozen characters on it. Then she wanted our pizza again for the next birthday party the following year. That make me feel incredible that our pizza box sat in her room for a year. A year! Are you kidding me?!? And it just makes them feel special. Two of my team members are like certified artists, and they’d do it for free, but I make sure to pay them out extra.

CPN: You set it up with the families ahead of time?

Christina: The family books their party, and the owner of that space knows to ask them for a theme. We’ve done Hot Wheels. We get a lot of Bluey and Frozen. Mermaids, rainbows, unicorns, outer space, you name it. We have about a week heads-up. And then we do a promoton through a company called Our Town, they do direct mail typically to new movers to the area, so as people are finding their new barbershop, and their new mechanic, and figuring out their footing, we’re in their inbox like, “Hey, Eric! Come get this free two topping pizza!” We have really good redemption on that, so that’s worth my ad spend. They also have a birthday option, but everyone gets bombarded on their birthday, right? How many emails do you get, like, “Don’t forget your free Starbucks!” or whatever? So we had them reverse engineer the birthdays to establish half birthdays, which I’ve always calculated in my own head. Someone will tell me their birthday is in March and I’ll automatically go, okay, so September. I don’t know why, it’s a stupid thing I’ve always done.

CPN: Was that a family thing? Celebrating half birthdays?

Christina: We didn’t go really hard on half birthdays when I was a kid, but I definitely took my daughter out to dinner and got her a little birthday cake for hers. Any excuse to make someone feel special.

CPN: I remember as a kid I had friends whose family’s were like, half birthdays are a big deal.

Christina: Totally! And I knew I personally would respond really well if someone was like, it’s August, it’s your half birthday, come get this. I would be like, Hell yeah! So what I’m finding is, instead of just coming in and redeeming their free pizza, they’re throwing themselves a little party. Throw in garlic knots. Throw in some drinks. And we’ll comp desserts for everybody. We throw in a big box of cinnamon bites with icing. People love hooking themselves up when it’s a party. So I’m making a lot more on those, and they come in really frequently. And we have a bunch of pre-made happy half birthday boxes, so we’ll just add their name. It’s been really fun, and it’s working really well.

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CPN: What’s your relationship like with the community?

Christina: Strong. We have the Stella Foundation, where a portion of all of our sales goes into that. My stepdad and I made that together, and we have a seven member board of directors that meets up annually to talk with local non-profits that then we dish money out to. So it’s a grant gifting 501c3. I lost three friends to a drunk driver in January, so by default I was like, we’re partnering with Mother’s Against Drunk Driving this year. We know that when we take care of the community, they’ll take care of us back. We got broken into twice in nine days. Like, shattered my front door, and took a few hundred dollars cash, which is so dumb. But I put it on Instagram, and we had a line around the block. People were ordering pizzas and sending them to hospitals, just to support us. I was in tears. People get broken into all the time, in Vegas it happens a lot, but I was heartbroken when I saw it. That’s my door! Even more than that, it’s my shop, and my second home. So it was awesome to see the community come out and rally with us. And it’s because we take care of them, so they take care of us. There are some other cool places we work with, like Opportunity Village — which helps job train adults with disabilities, which in turn helps the parents by lightening their load a little bit too. Cupcake Girls, they help women out of situational trauma with everything from housing needs to job interview training skills. Pizza can have a bigger impact than just, someone eats it and now they’re smiling. It can help the community. There’s a purpose behind it. And the team knows every time we burn a pizza, or we sell a lot of it, that it’s an adder or detractor beyond these walls. So that’s a cool thing to provide as well. Because a lot of times people just go to work and zonk out.

CPN: What are some of the challenges in being a small business in Las Vegas?

Christina: I think small business owners have similar challenges all over, aside from the obvious one where you trade in your 40 hour work week for 150, in that it’s a lot that’s just on you. I’m in a much better headspace now than I was, and I attribute a lot of that to working with Mike Bausch. He really helped guide me to not be in my business, 24/7. There was a time when if you would have come in to see me, we would have had to schedule this at 9, because I was the only one working the line, and I was killing myself. It’s easy to get caught in the, “I want to do everything myself so that it all gets done the right way.” And ego is a big part of that. Being able to delegate properly, and hold my team accountable, so that if I’m halfway across the country we’re still getting five star reviews and putting out the same pizza. You have to have so many things in place to get there, but once you do being a small business owner rocks. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s a rollercoaster. But when you’re stuck in it and doing everything yourself, your mental health can deteriorate a lot. There’s a fine line between you bought yourself a job that doesn’t pay well, and owning a business. And it’s as razor thin as restaurant margins. For Vegas specifically, there’s just a lot of red tape. When I owned my meal prep company, they didn’t have a specific type of business license to give me because I was one of the first ones to do it. Wasn’t really a restaurant. Wasn’t really a caterer. So I just got pushed around on people’s desk until I had to get an attorney to compel the county to get me a business license, even though I had already been operating for 10 months. Someone is gonna give me a piece of paper with my name on it, and it’s either going to be a license or a fine. So there’s a lot of red tape to get through as a small business owner. And you need the fortitude to just say, no, we’re gonna get this done. And you’ve really got to push on people sometimes, which can take a lot out of you when you’re also doing everything. Stuff like that just really stresses me out. Like the Uber thing.

CPN: I’ve definitely got some questions about that.

Christina: I feel like my problems keep getting bigger, but then I have more capacity to tackle them. Every time I’ve had a woe is me moment, I’ve gotten tougher.

CPN: Before we get into that, tell me a bit more about Vegas. What are the misconceptions?

Christina: That’s it’s just a party city. And a lot of people party here, don’t get me wrong. I was just in New Orleans and I had someone tell me they couldn’t imagine living in Las Vegas, but we’re not going to the strip every day.

CPN: Just like you aren’t going to the French Quarter every day when you live in New Orleans.

Christina: I used to live there too. So this is my second “party city”, I guess. But there are suburbs here. There are things to do that aren’t going to a day pool at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday. I have no idea when I did that last. People invite me when they come into town and I’m like, absolutely not. Vegas is a very big, small town. Everybody knows each other. And it’s very community forward.

CPN: What’s the pizza scene like?

Christina: Big, friendly, and diverse. I don’t think I could ever eat at every pizzeria in Las Vegas that I want to get to. There’s so many talented people here. And there’s so much room at the table, because Vegas keeps growing. And when the Uber thing happened, we all really bonded over that, because a lot of us were affected. People are in here all the time. I go to their shops, and they come to mine.

CPN: Where else do you go for pizza when you aren’t eating here?

Christina: I like Metro a lot. Brooklyn’s Best is really good. Settebello is awesome. Pizza Rock you can never go wrong. Good Pie, and he’s opening a location close to me in Henderson, which is exciting. There’s a lot of good pizza here. And that’s just in the central and south. I don’t really go up north for anything ever, so I’m sure there’s great stuff up there.

CPN: What’s your daughter’s favorite?

Christina: She clowns on me. She likes ours. She likes Metro. And just to poke, and you have an 8-year-old too, so I know you get it — she’ll eat Little Caesars and tell me how good it is, even though she hates it. She’s a troll, and a monster. She’ll muscle through it, just to try and tell me that it’s good. So ours, Metro, and Little Caesars when she’s clowning.

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CPN: We hit on it a little bit, but in April you got a call from a customer with questions about menu items that were listed on Uber Eats, only you are not on the Uber Eats platform. So what was your initial reaction, and what immediately happened right after?

Christina: At first I was confused. I’m not on Uber, but let me download the app and see what’s going on. Because sometimes third party apps will just make you your own profile. That’s a thing. GrubHub does that in partnership with Yelp, and it’s super annoying. I have a GrubHub account, just so I can turn it off on Yelp and make people go to my website. And I have to do it every morning. It’s really annoying. But that’s what I initially thought happened. On Uber you can do a pickup option and see the address, and what I didn’t talk about a lot because I didn’t want to dox the guy too bad, was that it was my old address where my meal prep company and my first pizzeria was. I recognized the address immediately and I was like, that’s weird. I thought it was a mistake.

CPN: The address definitely makes it seem like more than a coincidence.

Christina: I never had an Uber account there, but the internet does weird things. I got to know that owner of that pizzeria, he does bagels and pizza, and I had just lent him a stand mixer for like the whole spring. He wished me happy Easter. I thought I knew this person relatively well. So I immediately called his cell phone to be like, this is weird. Do you know what’s going on? And he completely played stupid. So I told him I was going to place an order, and he said to let him know what happens. So I placed an order, and I watched the driver on the app as he picked it up from the store and drove it over to me, and it was his pizza. I’ve had it before. I’ve gone to support him. So this is not good now. So initially I had a wave of rage, obviously. I was fuming. But then I had a big feeling of…I’m going to make this work in my favor. There’s got to be a silver lining here. And that’s usually what my brain defaults to when I’m in crisis mode. What’s the lesson? So Mike, my mentor, was out of town that weekend without a cell phone for the first time in probably 25 years, so I didn’t feel like I had a whole lot of people to call. And I didn’t want to show up at his shop and break all his fingers, but I’m pissed about this. So I went home and took screenshots of everything, and in the morning I went to pull everything up again and the name on my receipt had changed. And on the app it said Nora’s Italian, which is another restaurant like three miles that way. And I knew I didn’t order from Nora’s last night, but they had changed the name. Thankfully I had taken screenshots or I would have been shit out of luck. So I drove to the parking lot, ordered from “Nora’s”, and sent it to a friend’s house so I could watch it all happen. So now we’re just changing names until we get caught. And I didn’t want to believe it. In the app you can look at restaurants by location, by distance, so all the ones that were like 3.68 miles from my house or whatever, they’re all going to go back to this address. So I kept pulling them up and found 15 more he was doing it to. Other local businesses. Places that are on The Strip! You’re gonna rip off a restaurant inside the Cosmo?!? They will burn your house down! You’re gonna take on MGM? Are you nuts? I found that whole list, I ordered from those restaurants, and I sat it on for a couple days. Then I called the other restaurants and let them know. So that all happened on a Saturday, and I called him on Tuesday and asked if he’d had an opportunity to look into it. He tried to play stupid again, and I just went full psycho on him. I told him you have 20 minutes, or I’m going to the news. Within 20 minutes, none of them were accepting orders. They weren’t gone from the platform, but they were off. But I took it to the news anyway, and it just exploded. And that’s when things really got weird — and at no point did I ever say his name because people are a lot crazier than me — but the internet did what it does and found him and ripped him to shreds on Yelp and Google. Then other restaurants started looking themselves up on apps they weren’t on, and it was like a viral problem on Uber because they don’t have guidelines in place to make sure you are who you say you are. Doordash and GrubHub do though. You have to show your business license and address. So he had all these ghost concepts named after existing restaurants. And this is hundreds of restaurants nationwide.

CPN: From one guy?!?

Christina: Other people were doing it too. Uber already settled with Chicago years ago. They’re well aware of the loophole. They’re making 30% off every order. And we’re working so hard to have a good reputation. What if he got someone sick? His health report was full of stuff I would never let fly here. Dude, you’re handling people’s food, so it’s a public health problem now. One of my best friends is an attorney here, and was already suing Uber in regard to sexual assualt cases, so she’s very familiar with what’s going on in the Uber world, and so we filed a class action lawsuit two weeks later, and now it’s going to federal court. I’m guessing Uber will probably settle and continue doing what they’re doing, but I hope not. So it’s a waiting game for now. Could be six months, could be six years. I don’t know. It’s awful. You can’t do that.

CPN: I watched your video where you explain it, but I didn’t fully understand the depth of it until now.

Christina: And this is someone that I know! I lent you my mixer! I got you the mail keys when you couldn’t find them! I helped you in that store. His mixer went down and we were at my storage unit within an hour to get him back in business. We take care of each other in Vegas, and I felt totally backstabbed by that. People do weird stuff when they’re struggling to make money, but there are a lot of other pizzerias in this town that aren’t mine. So that made it personal. Until I saw he did it to fifteen other people, and then it’s not just a me thing, this guy is a crook. But what am I going to do? Sue him for the equity in his house? The problem is with Uber, and it’s impacting all these other businesses. Who cares about getting 40 grand from him if we can protect all these other businesses nationwide. Uber has already admitted this is a problem, but they’ve done nothing about it.

CPN: Is there an ideal resolution for you?

Christina: Ideally they put guard rails in place like every other third party platform, to protect both the consumers and small businesses. From my understanding you can just submit your driving record to Uber, wherever you got that from. Maybe it’s just a Word document you wrote yourself? I don’t even know if they do background checks beyond whatever is self filled in. They partnered with Budwesier to do safe rides specifically marketed to women to take them home from bars, but people are ending up sexually assaulted. That happens all the time, and Uber continues to let those people drive. They just don’t have good morals and business practices as a conglomerate. It’s a shame that it’s so easy to use, and people continue to utilize Uber. They don’t give a shit about the consumers they’re selling to, or the restaurants they’re taking 30% off the top from. At minimum they can do what Doordash and GrubHub does, and just verify you are who you say you are. If you want to open a ghost kitchen, there’s nothing wrong with that. I could open Big Tina’s Thighs N’ Fries and sell chicken out of here if I wanted to, you just shouldn’t be able to do it off an existing restaurant’s name. I could sell hot dogs out of the trunk of my car right now and call myself Nathan’s. That’s how loose it is.

CPN: You had that name locked and loaded!

Christina: I may have thought about it a few times…

CPN: So what happened to this person? He’s not still in business?

Christina: He’s still around. Google and Yelp removed all the negative publicity he got, because they want reviews of the food, and not politically or news charged stuff. So he’s still around and cranking. I drive through that parking lot periodically because the salon I go to is over there, and he’s still sending out food. I can’t imagine he’s still doing that, because he got a lot bad publicity off of it. But knowing what he spent on that build out, plus the quality of his food, I don’t know how he’s still in business.

CPN: He just does pizza?

Christina: Pizza and bagels, so they’re open for breakfast. And that’s how he was able to find so many restaurants. It wasn’t just pizzerias they were ripping off, it was bagel cafes, and BabyStacks pancakes, and sandwiches. They were open for so many hours a day that there was other stuff he could do to capitalize.

CPN: It’s crazy that he’s making all of those different things.

Christina: It seems like a lot more work than just being honest and doing business with good morals.

CPN: Just spend that time working on your pizza!

Christina: Exactly! Work on your trash pizza! And because it was in my old location, it pains me to think about how many people in my community thought they were shopping my store and didn’t have the heart to tell me my pizza sucks. And I have no idea if it went on for two months, or two years. No idea.

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CPN: You’ve brought him up a couple times, so let’s talk about your mentor, Mike Bausch. How did you meet him initially?

Christina: He’s my pizza big brother. Actually, more like my business big brother.

CPN: And what’s his shop?

Chrstina: Andolini’s. He also owns 12 different restaurants in Tulsa, across seven different brands. He’s got this all dialed in and figured out. He actually created a whole restaurant course that I got to help pilot, and now I’m connecting restaurants all over the world with it. I do consultations in Australia, Ireland, Isle of Man, I have a lady in Africa getting on board. I get to help these other restaurants through his philosophy and his program. So that’s my other thing I do, which is really fun to connect with people all over the world who are in the struggles I once was in in like 2016 and 2017, and help them slingshot over his 20 years of headaches and my seven years of headaches, in order to find success. Here’s the blueprint. Because no one tells you. You just figure it out, or most people close after a year or two. That’s just reality. I saw him at Pizza Expo and within five minute of his first seminar I was like, he’s brilliant. I want to learn from him in some capacity. So I followed his Instagram and learned about his restaurants and tried to emulate what made sense to me. Then I met him at the 2022 Pizza Expo. We collided, like our bodies ran into each other, which was really embarassing. But I word vomited all over him about how much I loved his stuff, and we just connected. He wrote a book that I loved, and that turned into everyone wanting him to consult, but he didn’t have time. So that’s how he created the course that I got to pilot. What maters? What doesn’t? How do we do restaurants profitably so that I’m not gonna hate my life doing it? We have 130 restaurants that we work with that follow those systems and are finding a lot of success with it. Mike has guided me on everything from how to understand your numbers, to troubleshooting pizza. And troubleshotting pizza is really such a small component to owning a pizzeria. People like to lean on the food a lot, but if you don’t have your metrics, and your marketing, and your financials dialed in, you’re dead in the water. He’s helped me tremendously, and it’s so cool to be able to pay that forward.

CPN: How do people find out about the program?

Christina: Follow Mike’s Instagram. Or go to Unsliced.com. It’s a total no-brainer crash course. Pizza ask me if they should go to Pizza University and I would say yes to learn pizza, but if you’re already good at it you need to understand your numbers, and how to run a staff, and how to run it as a business and not as a job. A lot of people work their ass off for nothing. And it doesn’t matter if you make really good pizza. For me my family, and having time for my freedom, is the best part of owning a small business. And I didn’t have that for years.

CPN: So there was a big change after you started working with him?

Christina: When I was doing meal prep and pizza I was gone from Thursday to Sunday, sun up to sun down, and still cranking 12-18 hour days during the week. I was killing myself. Running a restaurant isn’t the same as running another business. Restaurant math is different. Understanding how to do it is one thing in the first place, but having the tools to do it consistently…right before you got here I was working on a small section of our inventory sheet. I was looking at how our food cost went from this percent to that percent, and I was able to indentify that we had a new team member that was helping with inventory, and they were confused on one part. When you know things that well, your confidence is up here. You’re IN your business. But I have people I talk to all the time who say, “I don’t know even know how much money I make off this pizza.” Being able to help people in that respect is huge. It gives them piece of mind, and confidence. Running a samll business can be fun.

CPN: How does it feel when someone tells you you make their favorite pizza?

Christina: I hate it. And I know that sounds crazy! If Manizza’s is their favorite, then that’s awesome. That sparks joy. I’ve had people try to make me feel good by saying, “I only want you to make my pizza!” There’s not a bigger stab to my heart then that statement. I get that they want me to feel good, but every pizza coming out of here should be the same no matter who makes it. We put so much effort into consistency. Our people are freakishly talented, and really good at what they do. But if it’s Manizza’s is their favorite? That rocks. People tell me we have the best pizza in Vegas, and I don’t know about that. And how do you quantify best in pizza anyway?

CPN: Just your favorite, right? You make my favorite pizza.

Christina: Favorite is great. Favorite feels good.

CPN: You have to get that a lot from the kids. Especially with the birthday boxes.

Christina: All the little kids make me so happy. We have people who come in here three or four days a week, which is a lot to frequent any restaurant. That’s a lot of pizza. But they don’t feel like trash after because it’s not instant yeast and dough that got mixed that morning, and now it’s expanding in your gut. But I do love it when we’re the favorite pizza. It’s a huge compliment.

CPN: Is there anything else you’d like people to know about Manizza’s?

Christina: We covered a lot! Come visit during Pizza Expo, though I might not be here because I’ll be at the expo. A lot of people tour the shop. This year I think we had 30 different people stop by, whether they were just interested in doing the Unsliced course and wanted to see it in action, or they were Instagram friends. But come see us!

Piggybacking off something Christina and I talked about (and I absolutely don’t want to tack a referendum to the end of her very thoughtful interview), I have a major issues with food delivery apps. Some which have been addressed in a hilarious manner:

And others far more specifically (the breakdown of the way that the various apps’ fees alter a restaurant’s margins is especially illuminating and devastating):

I’m assuming the majority of you love food and restaurants in the same way I do (which is why you’re here), so I’ll make my plea to order from them directly when possible, and dine in as often as you can.

I would also strongly recommend that you avoid Uber at all costs — both as a food delivery and rideshare service. In case you were thinking some of things Christina said about them as a company might not be as serious as they sound, I can absolutely assure you that they are.