Chipotle has gotten into the pizza business.
According to the Denver Post, the Mexican fast-food chain is expanding into the pizza business, investing into a chain called, Pizzeria Locale.
The company's website announced the new pizzeria will be ran by the original restaurant owners, Bobby Stuckey and Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson. The first restaurant is located in Denver, which opened in May, and the fast-food chain is exploring options of opening a second and third location, also in Denver.
According to Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold, the company's CEO and founder Steve Ells has been friends with restaurant owners for 10 years and agreed to work to together if the opportunity ever presented itself.
"Bobby and Lachlan are extraordinary restaurateurs who truly understand what it takes to provide an exceptional dining experience," Ells said. "I have known them for years and I thought their pizzeria in Boulder presented the perfect opportunity to collaborate. Opening Pizzeria Locale using a model similar to Chipotle allows us to make extraordinary pizza, made with high-quality ingredients accessible to everyone."
Patterson said the friends found a project they were all passionate about and "couldn't be happier than to have partner in Chipotle that shares our vision of making our pizza more accessible to people."
The pizzeria offers a menu that includes 10 classic pizzas, four American classics, or customer-created combinations. The pizzas are fired up into the oven once ordered and baked in less than two minutes. The restaurant also serves red or white Italian wine on tap.
"It's really central to making this thing work in a fast-casual format," Arnold said. "With the type of oven that they used at the original Locale, it would be really difficult, given the volume that you do in a fast-casual environment, to keep all of the pizzas cooking perfectly without tremendously skilled pizzaoili."
This is not the company's first trip outside areas other than Mexican food. The pizzeria joins Chipotle's six ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen restaurants in Washington and Los Angeles.
