The US Pizza Team is a network of pizza makers from across the United States. We pride ourselves on being open to talent and eagerness, but it is always nice when a gift horse walks right into our pizzeria. The horse in this case is Nicholas Harper, owner of Peace of Pie on Hartwell in Fair Play, SC.
From beginning his pizza journey only recently, to competing in national competitions and even attending international competitions abroad, Harper has been doing, learning and even teaching some of what he has learned along the way, however short a journey it has been so far.
USPT Coordinator Brian Henandez was able to get Nicholas to sit down and gossip about pizza, the future, and pizza. Did I mention pizza?
Brian Hernandez: Tell us a little about your beginnings in pizza.
Nicholas Harper: We are located in Fair Play, South Carolina. Just a dot on the map in the northwest corner of the state, close to Clemson. Lakes aplenty out here. I bought the restaurant in November of 2020 and immediately shut it down. I was the fourth owner of a pizzeria in this location and the third name change. During that time, I attended Pizza University in Maryland and took a class on New York and Neapolitan pizza, became a certified pizzaiolo, then we reopened Jan. 8 of 2021. I had never made pizza before so it was al lnew to me but I took to it right away. About a year after opening (Dec. ’21) the entire restaurant got flooded out, so we rebuilt it bigger, better, stronger and reopened in March ’22. That April I won a sweepstakes from USPT sponsor, Margherita Meats, and got to go to the World Pizza Championships in Parma Italy with the USPT. We got to hang out with them while they competed. That was a huge turning point for us. The local paper did a huge piece about us going over there with the team. That essentially put us on the map. Since then, business has exploded. After the trip I started competing with some success. After that I was approached to become a competing member. About five months ago, we opened Grateful Days Taproom. We’ve got 11 rotating craft beers, and we do wine. With the pizzeria and the taproom, it’s a very, very fun spot. Lake life. Alright.
Hernandez: I noticed a lot of tie- dye in the uniforms and references to peace and the Grateful Dead. Is there a story there?
Harper: You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I used to have a long beard and hair down to my belly button. I always knew I wanted the word peace in the name. I wanted to somehow incorporate the hippie atmosphere you get in a lot of pizza restaurants into ours. I always knew there were going to be tie-dyed t-shirts, and about a year ago we bought some chef coats and my brother tie-dyed them too.
Hernandez: Right on. Why choose pizza if there was no personal history there?
Harper: I love pizza so much in comparison to a lot of other styles of food. Because the people, pizza people, are just a different people. When you go to eat pizza, I guarantee you’re in a good mood. It’s very seldom people come into the restaurant that are in a bad mood. They’re already happy because they’re coming to get pizza. The pizza world is one of the most fun restaurant worlds to be in. And for me, it’s very relaxing, very homey. When you’re visiting Peace of Pie, we want you to feel like you’re just eating at a friend’s house. And as for the Dead, I was a casual 
fan that has graduated to huge. There are a couple guys in the kitchen that are serious Dead Heads and we even have a couple customer taken photos of Jerry himself in concert hanging in the Tap Room. Our goal is to give you pizza that you’re not going to get anywhere else in South Carolina. I want you to honestly say, “why in the hell is this restaurant all the way out here in the middle of nowhere and not in a big city”?
Hernandez: To what do you attribute your success in this location, since it has seen some closures before?
Harper: All the pizzerias in this location before me used frozen dough. I decided right away nothing but fresh dough. I went the Pizza University and then immediately bought a Marra Forni mixer and started making dough. I’ll be 100% honest, at first, the dough was not great. It took about 6 months to get a full grasp on the dough. And looking back, it’s so awesome because I had customers come up and were like, “You’re figuring it out now, aren’t you? It’s getting better.” While I really wanted to do Neapolitan style, I knew it would not really be accepted around here so I had to start with a New York style instead and developed a dough recipe for that.
Hernandez: You have come along way in a short time. What are your future plans for Peace of Pie?
Harper: The goal for me has always been to have multiple restaurants. Whether that means franchising or opening multiple units myself, that has always been the goal. But which of those alleys I want go down I’m still figuring out. I’ve had a couple of opportunities to go to another brick and mortar, but we just haven’t enough staff to do it. I’ll be honest, attending PMQ’s Pizza Power Forum (PPF) a few days ago (at the time) made me realize that in three and a half years I haven’t been trusting my employees enough to let them take over the things that I’m in control of. For the longest time, I’ve worked open to close in the restaurant for most of the time we’ve been here. This is the first year I’ve actually been able to take days off and do things. Used to be if we went on vacation, we shut the restaurant down. I have been working on that trust issue on my own throughout this year leading up to the PPF, but listening to some of the panelists there made me realize if you don’t give the opportunity for your team to grow into the position that you need them to, the business is never going to grow to the position that the business needs to either. I’m coming back from that and working on tidying up my policies. Tidying up things to where if I’m not here, things are still run the exact same way day in and day out. Running a restaurant is just herding cats. The best you can do is herd those cats a little closer and keep their pen just a little smaller.
Hernandez: How do you take a step back and make the realization that “I’m the problem?”
Harper: Honestly, this is a brand-new realization from the PPF. There were 2 or 3 specific panels that I swear to God, it felt like there was no one else in the room, and they were having a conversation with me. I always said that I know I can do it right. I know I can do it the way that I want to, so I want my hands on it. But on the contrary side of that, if my people cannot do it just as good as I can, that’s also my fault because I haven’t trained them to be that good. So, it’s taking a hard look in the mirror and realizing, I’m the one holding my people back by not letting them do what they already know to do.
Hernandez: You’ve mentioned growth hindered by staffing. Is this something you have planned for?
Harper: The PPF, again, made me realize I think we’re to the point now to where we’re going to have to start looking at the possibility of getting robotics in here. Whether it’s a, a machine that helps me cut and roll dough or whether it’s a machine that helps me press the dough. That’s where we lose most of our time, hand tossing. The other day we did about 220 pies, the most we’ve ever done I think, and it took everything that we had to get those 220 pies. But that number is only limited by my ovens and staff issues. I have some new ovens coming that can hold 4 times as many pies as I can right now, now we just need extra hands.
Hernandez: You don’t see it as taking a job away from a human?
Harper: Nope I see them as tools to help the humans. The employees want them as well. If we have three people rolling a 55 lb. bag of flour, it’s gonna take them an hour, but I also know they won’t all roll the same. If I can make the job easier and get consistency and free them up to other things in the pizzeria, then great. It just makes life easier.
Hernandez: Tell us a little about how you got on the USPT?
Harper: Funny story, I won a sweepstakes through Margherita meats but deleted the first 3 emails thinking they were scams. They finally got me on the phone and convinced me it was legit. And they sent me and my wife Emily to Parma, Italy in 2022 to, in essence, hang out with the US Pizza Team. Now, that’s all I thought it was going to be. I literally thought it was just going to be like, “here, you can tag along with us for a while”. First off, I didn’t even know the United States Pizza Team existed. When I found out I cannot tell you the level of excitement that I had. I was like, “Oh my God, Emily, this is real! There’s a freaking team that competes in pizza! Do you hear me?!” Then when we got to Italy, and I started meeting everybody, I’m just looking at these people like, wow, these are pizza kings in a sense. But what was really neat to me was the genuineness of the team. During the ten days that we were in Parma, I was able to talk to any and everybody on the team that went to Italy, and they were giving me advice for the pizzeria. One crazy thing I didn’t expect though was the amount of press I got for going, and I didn’t even do anything. The town did a newspaper article about it and the county went nuts. We had people driving 45, 50 minutes to come try the pizza. And I thought the whole thing was a scam! When we got back, I joined up and was successful in a few competitions since then. To me, competitions are like going to school. You just learn so much being at the grown-up table of pizza, but you can also show off what you can do with pizza.
