Have you ever dreamed about making the perfect pizza or wondered how?
Conor Cudahy did and, after a year of testing hundreds of pizza recipes, came up with his idea of pizza perfection. He started “Lala’s Neapolitan-ish Pizza,” during the pandemic as a pop-up business. The 27-year-old from Somerville, Massachusetts had been thinking about what makes great pizza since his mother gave him a book about pizza when he was in middle school.
That book, “American Pie”, by Peter Rienhart was so important to him that he brought it halfway across the world in 2018 when he accepted an assignment as a Peace Corps teacher in the Southeast African country of Malawi. He was still living there in 2020, working for an educational nonprofit, when the pandemic hit and the government closed schools.
Heading back to the United States, Cudahy was “100%” certain he wanted to work in education. But not long after landing, he felt thrown into a kind of limbo; the country was in lockdown, and there were no job openings.
Like millions of other people experiencing the disruption of the pandemic, he needed to make a pivot. And, perhaps not surprisingly, his focus returned to his original passion: pizza. Jet lagged and restless in the middle of the night, he went online and ordered a portable pizza oven. It would become a key tool for his future business, but at the time he was thinking about it only as a hobby.
“I was just kind of thinking about what am I going to do with my time?” he said. “You know, at my parents' house. I didn't have a job.”
But he kept friends and family well fed, experimenting with different pizza recipes and, he joked, likely being responsible for helping more than one person gain a ”quarantine 15.”
He landed a fellowship in education in Boston in July of 2020. Then a month later, Governor Charlie Baker imposed new pandemic restrictions banning alcohol sales at restaurants and bars unless customers also bought food prepared on site.
Cudahy saw an opportunity.
“A lot of breweries that didn't sell food were looking for different ways to, you know, fill that need,” he said. “And that's really where the idea behind…starting with a mobile operation came from.”
Using that portable wood-fired oven, he set up shop in the fall of 2020 at pop up events and local breweries, selling his signature topping combinations on a slightly charred crust. He named his venture “Lala’s Neapolitan-ish Pizza” after his mother Laura, whom he calls his “biggest cheerleader.” And when it quickly became clear he needed to make more than one pizza at a time, he convinced friends and family to invest in a $17,000 wood-fired oven.
“I still hope they think that, you know, we're doing well so far,” said Cudahy.
From permitting and business licensing to sourcing ingredients, Cudahy found setting up a business “a lot more complicated” than he thought it would be. Even making the many dough balls he needs has proved a challenge. But he’s having fun and mapping out a future where pizza is a bigger slice of his life.
He hopes to introduce frozen pizza next summer, and a brick and mortar “Lala’s” down the road.
“Being forced out of Malawi and trying to come back and figure out what I wanted to do, it really forced me to think about what I was passionate about, what I wanted to spend my time doing,” Cudahy said. “Had I come back and it was normal… I might not have been able to take the leap.”
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