Operations
Wholly Stromboli brings New York, Detroit-style pizzas to small-town Colorado
Wholly Stromboli stands out with its pizzas and stromboli in Ft. Lupton, Colorado.
March 20, 2025 by Mandy Wolf Detwiler — Editor, Networld Media Group
Melissa Rickman is from New Jersey — her entire family is from New York. When she was 10, her family moved to California. She had always loved New York-style pizza.
"Being from the East Coast, it was really the only acceptable style of pizza in my house," she said in a phone interview with Pizza Marketplace. "When we moved to California, it was pretty tragic for my family because we just couldn't find any great pizza or anything that we really liked."
While visiting a department store, Rickman and her mother passed a small pizza place, and her mother said they should try it out sometime. They visited, and the smell was right. There was an upright and a cooler, and a Baker's Pride oven. Pizzaiolos spun dough in the air, and Rickman fell in love.
She told her dad she wanted to make pizzas for a living. Her mother made stromboli for the family, and Rickman told her mother she should sell them.
"I was obsessed," Rickman said. "As I got older and I got married, any opportunity I had to make stromboli, I was doing it." She'd make them for family and friends, at Super Bowl parties even though she didn't give a hoot about football — it was just the opportunity to feed people.
She moved to Colorado from California and initially worked a job as a bill collector, one she called "soul sucking." Her cube mate asked her what she wanted to do as a permanent career, and Rickman said she would open her own restaurant and call it Wholly Stromboli.
In 2008, she was laid off, and her husband, Eric, asked her what she wanted to do. She said she wanted to build Wholly Stromboli and her husband agreed to support the family while Rickman made her dream restaurant come true.
Wholly Stromboli opened its doors in 2010 in Ft. Lupton, Colorado. The first few months and years were hard, Rickman admits. The town had a population of 6,500 people with 49% non-English speaking. "A lot of people, including the mayor, thought I was nuts," she said. "We were not only out of place here because there were no other full-service restaurants in town — every other place you paid at the counter — we're the only Italian restaurant for miles."
Rickman knew she was going to have to pull from other communities to make Wholly Stromboli work. Knowing that the rent in her town was inexpensive, she would have to work hard to stand out.
"Sundays we would sit and wait for customers to come," Rickman said. "Nobody did, but we had to hang in there. We knew that we had to be consistent, so we couldn't close if it was slow. There were nights we sat there for an hour waiting before close, and nobody would come.
"Now, Sundays are our third-busiest day of the week."
She and her husband, Eric, attended a pizza trade show and tried to learn as much as they could before opening their doors, but it was real life that taught them those hard lessons.
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Photo: Wholly Stromboli |
On the menu
Today, pizza and stromboli make up 65% of sales.
The Hulapeno is the top seller and has cream cheese, ham, Genoa salami, Ezzo pepperoni, Italian sausage, Muenster and Provolone cheeses, jalapeno and pineapple. It is served with house-made marinara.
Pepperoni is still king at Wholly Stromboli, and the Bronx Bomber, which has mozzarella, Ezzo pepperoni, Italian sausage, bell pepper, onion, mushroom and black olives rounds out the top three sellers.
Wholly Stromboli serves two styles of pizza, a New York-style thin crust that is cold-proofed for 72 hours and a Detroit-style pizza made in pans Rickman designed herself with Lloyd Pans. Instead of soggy pieces in the center, there's a rectangular cut out in the center of the pan so every piece gets the exciting chewy, crispy, cheesy crust Detroit is known for.
Aside from the dough, much is made in-house, including sauces, their own cream cheese, pasta chips, a ricotta blend and bread pudding using Rickman's mother's recipe.
Pizzas and stromboli are baked in a 40-year-old Baker's Pride double-stack oven affectionately called "Vincenzo." Rickman is looking at alternatives since the ovens get extremely hot and are not insulated.
The stromboli on the menu is a differentiator for Wholly Stromboli. While many pizzerias may menu one or two, there's an entire line of them at Wholly Stromboli.
"I think the way that we roll our stromboli sets us apart," Rickman added. "Often times, because of the labor and the time it takes to cook, you kind of get a flopped-over stromboli. Ours is actually rolled like a cinnamon roll."
The restaurant features local breweries on tap.
"We believe that we put a lot of care and love in what we do, and we want to partner with other that do the same," Rickman said.
Hospitality
The brand's hospitality also sets it apart.
"Our mission is to enrich the lives of everyone we meet through exceptional hospitality, food and drink," Rickman explained. "We believe that's everybody — not just our guests — but our community and the people around us, our vendors, everyone who walks through our doors.
"You can get your tummy full anywhere and there's lots of places with great pizza, but can you come and get the experience we're going to give you in a 115-year-old building that we've restored? That, and our care for the community, too."
Rickman doesn't like to write checks for donations, preferring to be elbow-to-elbow with the people that make her community great. She'll give time, resources and products away instead.
Every year the brand hosts a spaghetti dinner with the proceeds going to the local school district to buy school supplies for the children. Wholly Stromboli has also worked with Colorado Mission of Mercy, a group that provides free dental care. There's also a "golf" tournament using the brand's hardened garlic knots.
Wholly Stromboli uses Toast as its POS system and Restaurant365 for hiring, job ads, HR, accounting, payroll and more. The bar has iPads for ordering, and the brand uses Jolt for checklist management.
"We're very tech heavy here," Rickman said. Though Wholly Stromboli is rooted in old-fashioned values, it wants to keep the technology away from the guests.
"In every instance, we want them to feel cared for," she said. "We want that human element, but we decided to go with an old-fashioned book binding with an iPad" at the bar. The iPads also help with fluctuating prices.
Rickman just signed up with ExpandShare for restaurant training using a cloud-based learning platform.
Rickman said she is looking at expanding Wholly Stromboli. They just purchased the building next door, which they plan to turn into a gelateria and Italian bakery.
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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