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Pandemic isn't slowing down Zalat Pizza’s growth

Zalat Pizza just opened its first store outside the Dallas-Ft .Worth market, marking its seventeenth store in total. Eight more units are planned, and the company isn't showing signs of slowing down.

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January 11, 2022 by Mandy Wolf Detwiler — Editor, Networld Media Group

How does a company grow during a pandemic? If you're Zalat Pizza, the answer is quickly. The company is on its seventeenth location since opening in 2015. Eight more are already under contract. That's some fast growth, but it has happened naturally, said owner Khanh Nguyen in a phone interview with Pizza Marketplace.

Sixteen of the units are in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, with the latest location opening in the Houston market, and all are corporate owned.

A native of Vietnam, Nguyen calls himself an "accidental restaurateur," having originally practiced law before entering the tech world with a couple of start-ups. After selling those, he found himself staying home and cooking for his family, which turned into a passion. Just three months later, he opened a late-night Pho restaurant in 2012, serving as head chef and line cook for the first year. He said he did every job in the restaurant, giving him invaluable experience.

Nguyen eventually took over a failing pizzeria next door, and Zalat Pizza was born in 2015. He spent six months on the dough recipe alone and another month perfecting his pizza sauce. He converted his second Vietnamese restaurant into a second Zalat store to keep up with demand. After that, stores seemed to open quickly.

It's a unique model, serving primarily pizza for takeout and third-party delivery only, with dine-in at just one location.

"We're born of the digital age," Nguyen said. "Most of our sales are over the third-party delivery platforms. 91% of our sales is one product — it's just pizza. We don't have wings. We don't do pasta. We don't have sandwiches. We have a couple salads, but that's it. … (pizza) is the entirety of our business."

The brand purposefully keeps the menu honed and small to be able to serve the best pizza, which given the fast that the competition is just a push of a button away, is critical to success.

"You can't grow into multi-units unless you can maintain quality," Nguyen said, "and so we put a lot of time and effort into our training program."

Zalat Pizza also has extended hours, staying open until midnight or later depending on location. There are few options that late at night, Nguyen said, aside from fast food. He had his Pho restaurant open until 2 a.m. and saw great success, and he knew pizza could do even better that late at night.

"We have a food goal and a people goal, and it's very cool that they kind of tie together. Our food goal is to make the very best tasting pizza in the universe. That's our mission," Nguyen said.

"I think one of our early customers called it 'luxury pizza for the masses. We think we're highly competitive with the best pizzas in the city, including all of the fancy, expensive sit-down restaurants. But our brand is casual. We go late, and we do mass volume, but it's all hand-made."

The pizzas are hand-stretched and cooked on deck ovens. Each pizza is checked and signed off on the box by a pizza "sheriff" whose job it is to maintain quality control. Cooks do not want to remake their items, and having a trained gatekeeper at the final push is a subtle conflict of interest that must be balanced.

He learned that method after reading an article about Thomas Keller, the acclaimed chef of The French Laundry in California and New York-based Per Se. Keller served as quality control on the line, and has a CCTV in his restaurants to examine dishes when he wasn't physically on-site.

"We teach all of our folks at training 'you are the last line of defense on a hand-made product that's going out to our customers and you have to have the courage and you're directed by the organization to push back on anything that you don't think is at the quality level that we think it should be at going out the door,'" Nguyen said. "We're dependent on love and care for every pizza that's cooked. It's one thing to design your food well. It's another thing to make sure your line can execute to the level that it needs to execute at."

Employees are, in fact, at the heart of Zalat's operations. Employees and fans of the brand are called Pizza Zealots.

"We want our folks to stay here for the long term and have a career with us, and we want them to be extremely dedicated as if they were owners. And they all are," Nguyen said.

Stock options, full benefits and 401K are available to frontline workers. (Aside: there's also a free company tattoo for employees who have been there more than a year.)

"If our wildest dreams fantasies come true, we would love for our frontline workers to all become millionaires," Nguyen said.

To maintain continuity across the brand, Zalat uses a commissary, where the dough is made and shipped fresh to the store and balled in house. "We're very, very careful with the dough process," Nguyen said.

The top seller is the Pepperoni Masterclass, which features all-beef pepperoni, cracked black pepper, oregano and chopped garlic.

The Dallas-Ft. Worth market isn't saturated yet, Nguyen said, and Houston will be a "big market" for Zalat, with six stores already signed in that area. They have a head of development whose job it is to identify solid markets for the brand.

"I think we're fairly methodical about location identification," Nguyen said. "We've got a great location analytics partner that we use to identify locations given the demographics of our business."

Knowing how difficult the restaurant industry is, Nguyen said operators need to have a healthy respect for the economics of the business and how important sales are.

"You can't just have great food and have your restaurant make it," he said. "Of course, you're going to push to have the best food that you can, but that's the bare minimum. You have to have the ability to figure out how to sell it. It's a low-margin business,s and you've got to have the volume there. If that takes you standing there and glad-handing every customer that comes in so that they have a great experience at your restaurant and that they return and tell their friends, that's what you need to be prepared to do."

About Mandy Wolf Detwiler

Mandy Wolf Detwiler is the managing editor at Networld Media Group and the site editor for PizzaMarketplace.com and QSRweb.com. She has more than 20 years’ experience covering food, people and places.

An award-winning print journalist, Mandy brings more than 20 years’ experience to Networld Media Group. She has spent nearly two decades covering the pizza industry, from independent pizzerias to multi-unit chains and every size business in between. Mandy has been featured on the Food Network and has won numerous awards for her coverage of the restaurant industry. She has an insatiable appetite for learning, and can tell you where to find the best slices in the country after spending 15 years traveling and eating pizza for a living.

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