Pizza Quick and Pizza Qwik, Pizza Time and Pizza Tyme. That doesn't count the myriad mom-and-pop operations on every street corner and in every shopping-mall food court in the land: Pizza Inn, Pizza-Gram, Pizza Face (really, in Gaithersburg), Pizza Factory, Pizza Patio, Pizza Haven, Pizza Heaven, Pizza Hot Line, Pizza in Motion, Pizza Italia, Pizza Wheel, Pizzaporium, Pizzarama, Pizza Pronto, Pizza Etcetera, Pizza Platter, Pizza & Pasta. If you were to take these four companies alone, stack their combined projected 1990 output in a single pile of pies, tip the pile into a landfill and bury it, you would still have enough supermarket pizzas, restaurant pizzas, school cafeteria pizzas and 7-Eleven slices to make millions of adults noticeably obese. Jerry's Subs and Pizza, a 67-store chain that serves almost as many pizzas as it does subs, will open 10 to 15 outlets. It's planning 20 new units - bringing its total to 80. Then there's Pizza Movers, a regional firm with headquarters in Landover.
Pizza Hut, with 123 outlets in the area, plans to open 12 to 20 outlets a year here for the next few years - nearly all offering carryout and delivery only, since that part of the pizza business is growing fastest. In 1990, pizza plenitude, as we know it, is likely to give way to pizza glut:ĭomino's, which has 55 stores here, will open more than 20 new ones in Montgomery County alone. This year, however, we may begin to see some combat fatigue among the dough boys of Washington, and perhaps even witness the demise of a unit or two. In fact, that is what's sort of intriguing about it: The combatants all seem to be drawing strength from the battle, opening more outlets, hiring more drivers, selling ever more pizzas. Nor has the pizza war been lethal to anybody on either side. Mostly the fighting is confined to rhetorical sniping, direct-mail bombardments, the mobilization of large delivery fleets, blatant larceny of ideas and occasional public misstatements.
PIZZA TYME WINDOWS
Oh, it's not a criminally nasty conflict, with slashed tires and shattered windows and stuff like that. On the other side is everybody else: small outfits such as Trio Pizza and Postal Pizza, regional chains such as Armand's and Jerry's and Pizza Movers, and even the behemoth of the business, Pizza Hut. On one side is Domino's, which fired the first shot on July 7, 1983, by introducing Alexandrians to the concept that changed the trade: $3 off any pizza not delivered within 30 minutes. In case you hadn't noticed, there's a war going on, a pizza war.
And just for the record, the dough for all local Domino's stores is mixed in a spanking-clean commissary in Jessup, which means Newmyer's assertion about shipments from New Jersey is a couple of hundred miles off the mark - which he may have known to begin with. If Newmyer had run the advertisement, Domino's lawyers surely would have cooked up a sizzling rejoinder and rushed it straight to his doorstep, advising him that the only preservative in Domino's dough is ascorbic acid, Vitamin C. "I was gonna put that in the paper, but my boys wouldn't let me do it," he says. So I was gonna have an ad say: 'Armand's will not participate in any pizza war as long as the other side is using chemical warfare.' " With that, Lew hands over a snapshot of himself wearing a gas mask and holding an Armand's pizza in a deep pan. "Our dough is made in the basement every day and is made fresh sometimes twice a day. And they've got to use preservatives and this and that.
The first thing they do when they get it, they defrost it. If you drop a dough ball on your foot, you break a toe. They say it's not frozen, but it's one degree above frozen. Lew recaptures the conversation: "Domino's pizza is made up in New Jersey, and they ship it in here maybe twice a week. ," Ronnie begins, but his dad reappears, having found what he went to get.
These rooms, above the Armand's restaurant in the heart of Tenleytown, form the nerve center of the Newmyer empire, which includes four family-owned stores with annual sales of $5 million and six franchise operations. Lew grins and begins walking from one cramped, paper-choked office toward an adjacent one just like it, only smaller and messier. "Did you tell him about the gas mask?" asks Lew's son Ronnie. In fact, you can put three of their pizzas in one box." "They all got big boxes but a little bit of pizza. LEW Newmyer, warrior: "If you take all the cheese off of one of our pizzas, you have enough to make three of the other guys' pizza and still have some cheese left over," declares the founder of Armand's Chicago Pizzeria.
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