Piara Pizza, known for its lunch and dinner discounts and conveniently-ready pies for $5.99, is opening a location on the Westside at 11281 Santa Monica Blvd within the next six months.
Sergio Bayeh launched the company in 2005, aiming to make pizza that was both healthy and competitively affordable. Now, the pizzeria has 22 locations currently open, including an innovative drive-thru location in Van Nuys. Another 47 locations are under construction and are all slated to open before the end of 2021.
Managing partner Sean Tan said that the company always hires its employees from within the neighborhood of an opening location, indicating that the upcoming store is hiring about a month before it opens to the public on their website.
“We want to give opportunities for the neighborhood — the neighborhood supports you,” Tan told What Now Los Angeles. “When we hire a manager from the neighborhood, [running] our stores is so easy.”
There are no freezers onsite at Piara locations — dough is made fresh in-house daily, and cheese is shipped to locations and prepared onsite rather than arriving already shredded. No preservatives are used in any of their ingredients, and their chicken wings are baked rather than fried.
“We never hit the Westside. We’re trying to bring this style of pizza to an area that always had to pay more for better quality,” said Tan. “Whoever opens a pizza place they normally charges more money. In this situation, since we’re a franchise, we keep our price the same and our quality is amazing… we want to be the healthy alternative and also reasonably priced [so] we can feed everybody — especially now, with COVID, everyone is on a financial crutch.”
