I feel like pizza is one of those things where the ingredients are really cheap, but much of the value is in the special equipment needed to make it really well. Normal people don't have a 600F pizza oven, so even with the same ingredients they just can't make the same kind of product.
I agree that the oven made a huge difference. I wouldn't be surprised if its value was greater than the aggregate of everything else in the restaurant.
It's none of the chains anyone mentioned. It was just a single place in a dying rustbelt town, and closed up a decade or more ago.
In hindsight, it was obvious that this kind of place depended on being able to hire labor that it could pay less than it was worth. The dream around there was to snag one of the few steel mill jobs that was left, yet almost everyone I worked with went off to college and never came back. We all worked hard and used our brains. For example, they had tuned the oven such that a pizza was cooked in two revolutions of the stone. By using the peel to place the pizza in different spots on the stone you could vary the amount of time the pizza was actually in the oven without needing to set a timer or keep track of anything. Because, as you know, the perfect cooking time depends on the toppings ;). If you've ever watched a Pizza Hut/Dominoes/Papa John's/etc, you'll see that they just throw the pizza on a conveyor belt and forget about them. Everything gets cooked the same exact amount of time (in an over that looks horrendous for energy efficiency!).
My normality has been surrounded by people that make their own stuff, from septic systems, to custom cars, to work sheds, to brick barbeques and to wood fired pizza ovens.
There's an entire state here of people that wouldn't see that as much of a challenge to build or aquire if they wanted good pizza.
For years we just used the annealing oven out the back next to the glass furnaces .. other people had other ways.
