Lou Malnati’s, the popular Chicago-based pizzeria with sites throughout Phoenix, is getting ready to close two locations with plans to reopen elsewhere.
The company recently announced that by the end of February, Lou Malnati’s will close its locations in Phoenix at Uptown Plaza at the corner of Central Avenue and Camelback Road and Mesa’s Village Square at Dana Park shopping Center near the Baseline Road and Val Vista Drive intersection, according to the Phoenix Business Journal. The former opened in 2016 as the first in the Phoenix area, with 800-square-foot indoor space, a bar, and a 1,500-square-foot patio. After this location’s lease expired, the company decided the pizza chain could be more profitable in another location in Phoenix.
“We believe we have bigger opportunities to provide our customers with a better experience if we were to move locations,” Mindy Kaplan, Lou Malnati’s vice president of communications, tells the Phoenix Business Journal. “We just feel that there’s bigger and better opportunities for us with different real estate plays. We’re reinvesting those dollars into something that we think would be do even better and provide better customer experiences.”
While it’s still early in the search process, Kaplan tells the Business Journal that the company is currently looking for another space to rent in the central Phoenix area with better parking and more visibility from the street than the Uptown Plaza location. The company hopes to open a location in East Valley as a full-service, sit-down restaurant while also looking at the San Tan area of southeast Gilbert for that new location. Until these two new sites come to fruition, Lou Malnati’s has six locations in Phoenix, three being full-service – Surprise, Tempe, and Scottsdale – while the locations in Glendale, Chandler, and Phoenix’s Arcadia neighborhood are takeout-only.
