Nov. 20, 2024

Pizza Cheeks is expanding with a full-service restaurant, taking over the former Kaladi’s Bistro space.

Owners Barry Putzke and Jordan Taylor are remodeling the location at 26th Street and Minnesota Avenue and working on a menu that will expand with pasta dishes and more options for pizzas, sandwiches, salads and appetizers.

Pizza Cheeks opened in late 2020 out of a small kitchen in the downtown cocktail bar The Hello Hi, serving New York-slice pizzas by the slice and 18-inch whole pies. It offers five to eight pizzas and a build-your-own option, as well as a meatball sub, a few sharables and a couple of salads.

“We are limited with our location at the bar,” Putzke said. “We’re upholden to the bar hours and crowd; they don’t allow minors inside, so a family can’t come down at 6 for pizza, and we can’t be open for lunch.”

There’s still time remaining on the lease in The Hello Hi at 120 S. Phillips Ave., so it will remain open through then and possibly longer, Putzke said, but will just serve pizza by the slice, delivering the pies from the new location.

The Swedish-made oven will be moved out of downtown, as likely will the “50,000-pound” mixer in the basement that Putzke swore he’d never move again — until he started looking at prices for another one.

“We’ll have our own hours, sell whatever beer and wine we want, expand the menu and be a family-friendly place as well,” he said of the new restaurant. “At the core, that’s what we want; we want this to be a very family-friendly pizzeria with a mostly Italian menu.”

That expanded menu will include dishes like chicken parmesan and eggplant parmesan.

Taylor is excited about bringing linguine and clams to the table. “No one’s doing it,” he said. It’s a simple dish — “white wine, herb garlic butter, clams and a lot of herbs at the end” — that lets the ingredients shine.

While there are a few Italian restaurants in Sioux Falls, “I think there’s room for the version of it that we’re trying to come up,” Putzke said. “It will be approachable, driven by Jordan’s culinary background, and I think they’ll stand out in a good way.”

The new location likely will serve lunch and dinner. He’s envisioning hours of 11 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m. and possibly later on Friday and Saturday nights. He could see the kitchen staying open even later those nights for delivery or takeout.

Pizzas will come in the original size and a smaller one, Putzke said. Details are still being worked out, but pizza by the slice likely will be available, “maybe just for lunch though.”

Putzke and Jordan, who also own Bread & Circus Sandwich Kitchen and En Place Catering and are part of the Perch ownership group, initially thought of opening Pizza Cheeks as a stand-alone restaurant, “but we didn’t find anything we were really happy with. The opportunity presented itself to go it The Hello Hi.  It was a good opportunity to get it dialed in and to fill a need for late-night food downtown.”

They weren’t actively searching now, but “it was always in the back of our minds that we would like to have a full-service pizza restaurant rather than just a slice window.”

“When the news broke that it (the Kaladi’s space) was available, I talked to Jordan, and we were both in the same kind of mode, thinking that it would be an ideal spot,” said Putzke, who lives nearby. “It’s close to downtown but not downtown. It feels like a neighborhood location.”

He said the building’s owner already had received multiple offers, so “we scrambled the jets really quick.” They presented the concept to the owner, and “we’re happy they liked our vision for it.”

There was considerable interest in the building, said Scott Blount of Lloyd Cos., who brokered the deal.

“The owners chose this concept because they believed in what these guys are doing,” he said.

“The pizza is very, very good, and it has an audience that really likes it and has a customer base that appreciates it. And it’s going to get much better exposure now. These guys seem to be able to knock it out of the park every time they open a restaurant concept because they’re really good operators … so I think Pizza Cheeks is going to be very popular at that location.”

The fact that the building has served as a restaurant, first as Golden Wall Chinese Restaurant for two decades and then Kaladi’s, which closed in April after two decades and three sets of owners, “helps in terms of the costs to get it ready to go,” Putzke said.

“We’re in the middle of the construction phase now, getting things cleaned up and touched up,” he said. “So we don’t have an opening date yet. We’re trying to shoot for the end of the year, early 2025.”

For dining, there will be tables, and they’ll likely add booths, he said. There will be seating at the bar, which is getting a new top. Total capacity will be 80 to 90 diners.

The Italian beer Peroni will be on tap, along with a few other offerings, and more choices in bottles and cans, including seltzers, ciders and THC drinks. There will be a “decent wine selection” and Coke products.

They’re adding a half-dozen or so TVs, “so neighborhood folks can come down and have a pizza and watch a game,” Putzke said.

“We’ll have an arcade in the corner spot where families can come down and the kids can go play games in the arcade room. We want to bring back a little bit of that family pizzeria that most of us grew up coming to in town, whether that was here or elsewhere.”

Putzke added that he’s excited about being able to introduce more people to Pizza Cheeks.

“People just really love it, but because of the location and setup, it’s not a regular thing to get down there and enjoy it.”