Downtown Victoria: Open For Business - The Pizza Garden Story
Back in October I co-hosted the inaugural City Talks event. That great night of conversation focused on Downtown Victoria and whether it is currently thriving or dying, which seemingly depends more on your political perspective more than actual data. That said, even just going out for a walk or doing some shopping downtown doesn’t make it necessarily more clear. On the one hand you might see a bunch of new stores and then on the other, you might see a stalwart merchant that has been around for decades closed up. With all of this in mind, when I heard that a new pizza shop was opening up on Government Street and that is was the newest location of the very popular Vancouver brand of Pizza Garden, I thought it might be an opportunity to find out more from a new business’ perspective and I always like to check out a new pizza place.
For those that don’t know Pizza Garden, this is a successful Vancouver chain. I believe that the Victoria location is the twelfth or thirteenth location. The founder, Kubilay Demirel, opened his first place in Vancouver over 18 years ago and the first Pizza Garden a few years after that on Commercial Drive. While over the last few years we have seen an influx of new pizza-by-the-slice places around Victoria, most of them would fall into what we used to call buck-a-slice places. Pizza Garden is not like that, though they do serve primarily pizza slices. First, the pizza style is Neapolitan and second, they almost always have a huge selection of pizzas going. I love Neapolitan pizza, in fact my still favourite pizza, Standard Pizza on Cook Street, makes awesome Neapolitan. The new Victoria location of Pizza Garden is located at Government and Courtney Streets, at the bottom of the new Customs House building. Quite the location for a new pizza store and so I connected with them to see what there perspective is on Downtown Victoria.
I was able to sit down with Burçin Karaca, the Operations Manager of the new location for Pizza Garden and ask her a few questions. First, I wanted to know why Victoria? Karaca said that for her and her family they had been wanting to open a Pizza Garden in Victoria for some time. While most recently from Vancouver, it was their opinion that the Vancouver market is currently saturated both for pizza as a whole and Pizza Garden more specifically. When looking at Victoria, there was nothing like Pizza Garden currently around. I would definitely agree with her on this point as the way the place looks, is more akin to one of the fancier slice places you see in New York than anything that we currently have in Victoria (not that we don’t have a few awesome slice places, Brickyard for example). According to Karaca over the last few weeks since their soft opening, Victorians have been super receptive to their format and pizza. This was apparent to me as well, the two times I have gone by it has been very busy. I suspect that the location near the Inner Harbour will make it popular with tourists in the summer as well as with some of the nearby government offices.
When it came to selecting the location, the owners as I said, had been looking for a long time. The busyness of lower Government, the pedestrianized mall and the Customs House building, made them finally settle on this location. The space is beautiful, bright and clean on the inside and the open concept kitchen lets you see exactly what is going on in there. I also really like that they prepare the pizza dough in the front window along Government Street. I expect this will be very popular with tourists as they walk by next year.
With owners and manager having experience with setting up pizza places both in Vancouver and Victoria, I had to ask how the two cities compared when it came to supporting them in getting all their permits and filling out all the paperwork. I have to say I was really happy to hear a raving review for our City of Victoria business office. Apparently they went out of their way to help them; they came by for inspections at the times they promised; and really tried to remove barriers that would come up for them. This was apparently quite different from the experiences that they have had in the Lower Mainland.
To my initial question, Karaca says that she feels that Downtown Victoria is alive and well. That the city is full of kind people and that they are excited to be here to serve them great pizza. It definitely seemed to me that they had put in a significant investment which is a pretty clear indication that they believe there is life left Downtown.
If you are wanting to visit the new Pizza Garden, they will be having their grand opening this Saturday, December 7th from 12-4pm. There will apparently be some free mini pizzas for the first 100 customers to come in during that time. It is definitely worth checking out!