Italian Oven turns up heat on expansion plans

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 15, 1993 by Paul Frumkin

L ATROBE, PA. -- When James Frye began drawing up the blueprints for the Italian Oven in the mid-1980's, he kept his eye on a target he felt the larger players had missed.

"I saw the Olive Garden on one hand and Pizza Hut on the other," Frye says. "And they were both successful. So I went for the middle."

And three years after launching the first Italian Oven in Somerset, Pa., Frye and his company, Fornello USA, have opened 35 company-owned and franchised stores in seven states that gross an average of $1 million each.

Furthermore, the company has signed agreements with franchisees across the country to develop more than 300 stores within the next three to five years.

Whether the ambitious young dinner-house company can achieve the blistering expansion pace it has set for itself remains to be seen. Nevertheless, Frye has formulated a restaurant concept that contains several elements tailor-made for growth in the '90s, including a diverse menu of traditional, freshly prepared Italian dishes spiced up with a selection of wood-fired designer pizzas, an all-day per-person check average that runs between $6 and $7, an ambience that welcomes families and even a small retail section.

Frye -- an energetic entrepreneur who remains involved at nearly every level of the company -- also concentrated on developing a system whose operations are not particulary difficult to replicate in a franchising environment. For example, while the menu lists 72 items -- not including pizza variations -- most food items are utilized in a variety of different dishes. Chicken can be found in 15 separate selections in various forms, from Italian chicken fingers to grilled chicken pizza. As a result, food cost runs a moderate 24 percent of sales.

"We really have only a small inventory of food products," notes Linda Sample, The Italian Oven's marketing director. "Almost every food item is used in three different applications."

'Virtually no waste'

"I designed the menu so there was virtually no waste," Frye explains.

The all-day menu is divided into 10 sections: starters, $2.25-$4.25; salads, $1.85-$5.25; pizzas, prices vary according to choice of toppings; fancy pizzas, $8.95-$9.25; strombolis and calzones, $4.95-$5.75; pasta dishes, $4.75-$7.25; sandwiches, $4.50-$5.25; beverages, 75]-$2; wines-by-the-glass, $2.25; and beers on draft, $1.74-$2.50.

Most of Italian Oven's dishes are familiar, with the emphasis placed on pizzas and the red-sauce-and-pasta based cooking of southern Italy. That, also, is part of Frye's strategy. "We offer plain, simple pasta dishes," he observes. "And I knew when I started this that pizza was going more and more mainstream.

To help control quality and consistency, Frye has contracted with a company in California to make the chain's marinara-style tomato sauce from tomatoes freshly picked off the vine at the source. Jars of the proprietary sauce are also available for retail sales in the restaurants.

However, the Italian Oven does feature several signature dishes. For example, each restaurant offers Homemade Italian Wedding Soup, prepared from fresh vegetables, tiny meatballs, pasta rings and chicken. Two focaccia-style breads prepared from pizza dough -- called Italian tomato bread and Italian mushroom bread -- are also offered, as is an omelet sandwich with Italian sausage, peppers, mozzarella, provolone, Romano cheese and marinara.

All of Italian Oven's pizzas are prepared in woodfired ovens. The preparation method serves as one of the chain's key differentiation points from its growing competition, and the average unit has two wood-fired brick ovens placed prominently in an attractive exhibition-style kitchen.

Frye says he was originally inspired by wood-fired designer pizzas on a visit to Wolfgang Puck's trendsetting Cal-Ital restaurant, Spago, about eight years ago. A year or so later, he was further encouraged by the ability of the Los Angeles-based California Pizza Kitchen to create a highly profitable, tightly focused chain based on Puck-style gourmet pizzas.

At the Italian Oven the oak-fired ovens are run at a temperature of about 700 degrees, monitored by a digital temperature gauge placed in the brick.

At night the ovens are allowed to drop to about 300 degrees but are never shut off altogether. "It would take two days to get them back to the required temperature," Sample pointed out.

Everything is prepared in a separate pizza-making area by two kitchen employees trained to use the ovens. The pizza dought is prepared three times a week and frozen into balls, to be used as needed.

Two sizes of standard red-sauce-flavored pizza -- a 10-inch pie and a 12-inch pie -- are available with a choice of 16 toppings, including red onions, Italian ham, bacon, salami and broccoli. Each topping is priced at 75 cents for a 10-inch pie and 95 cents for a 12-inch pie.

Fancy pizzas are available only in the 12-inch size. Selections include a vegetarian pizza, basil pesto pizza, grilled chicken and spinach pizza and a ricotta and sausage pizza.