–By Christain Knight April 28, 2004 (Hood River News)
Andrew’s Pizza owner Andrew McElderry knows a good slice of pizza is a heck of a lot more than hand-tossed dough, tomato sauce, mozzarella, peperoni, and olives. It has to include some flat-screen television for “the game,” two heaping full-screen theaters for films, a little bit of playroom for the children, and a dash of ‘video arcade’ for the teenagers.
McElderry just dumped $200,000 into this recipe when he renovated his “hole in the wall” Andrew’s Pizza and Bakery into a bona fide pizza restaurant and theater. He will be celebrating the completion of this project with a grand re-opening April 29. The re-opening will include live music from the Hood River band Blue Trick, a clown, and toy give-away.
The six-week renovation is the most recent in a string of them, which have stretched the restaurant from a 750-square-foot hole to an operation that consumes 90 percent of the 10,000-square-foot Cedar Mall Building, a building that once housed an entire automotive dealership. For this expansion, McElderry hired Portland architect Randy Stegmeier to transform the 1,850 square feet of vacant space that was once Cascade Travel into a children’s playroom, video arcade, and 70 extra seats.
“We now have the capabilities to do special functions,” he said. But he is not finished yet. This summer, he’ll replace the original store-front windows with accordian-style windows that will allow his customers to eat under the light of the sun.
All of this over 13 years.
“I could have bought a house for what I’ve put into this,” McElderry said. “But I feel strongly enough that my business would sustain itself to invest in it.”
McElderry’s car was his first investment into the pizza restaurant. He used it as collateral for the $20,000 he borrowed from a bank. Back then, in 1990, McElderry was waiting tables for the Columbia Gorge Hotel, a job which barely paid the bills for the 24-year-old, who had graduated with a degree in history two years earlier. “It was time to make a decision,” he said. “It ws time to figure out a way to make a living in Hood River – because I love Hood River – or move on.”
McElderry decided for the first option in the form of dough, tomato sauce, cheese, meat and vegetables: pizza. “there was just Pietro’s in town,” he said. “So I figured there was a hole in the market.”
McElderry went home, experimented with pizza and decided he’d go for it. At first, his entire client-base consisted of his fellow workers at the Columbia Gorge Hotel, who allowed him to cook the crew meals and compensated him for the raw materials –labor was on him. After a good practice and better reviews, he decided to gamble with his car and opened up a tiny shop on Oak Street.
His parents flew out from Nantucket Island to help him open it up. His mother stayed one week. His father stayed two.
“My dad was my first employee,” McElderry said. “We had a lot of fun in those first one-and-a-half months. Some of my greatest memories come from that time.”
By the end of the first business day, McElderry and his dad had consumed the entirety of every meat, cheese, and vegetables. One customer, in fact asked for mushrooms on his pizza and when McElderry said, “Sorry, we’re out,” the man left, came back 15 minutes later with his own mushrooms from Safeway.
“We made $500 that day,” McElderry says with a nostalgic smile. And he didn’t even know how to toss the pizza dough – a skill that would elude him for six more months.
Films have been an integral part of Andrew’s Pizza since 1994, when McElderry transformed 5,000 unused square feet of potential in the back of the restaurant into a theater, which for the last nine years, has served as a destination for the Banff Mountain Film Festival. The first theater was so popular, he added a second screen four years later.
“When we originally opened Andrew’s pizza in 1991, we had no plans to open one (theater),” McElderry said. “But it just kind of happened.”
Pizza and theater seem to be a prolific combination for McElderry, one that leads to that result, “it just kind of happened.”
One autumn season before McElderry opened Andrew’s Pizza and Bakery, McElderry took an old Connecticut high school acquaintance out on a first date to McMenamins Theatres in Portland, which for a couple of bucks showed you a not-so-new movie and for a couple more, gave you some pizza to enjoy with it. He married that high school acquaintance named Melissa in October 1992.
“When I first walked into her apartment, I just knew,” McElderry said with a mix of pride and embarrassment. “It sounds corny and sappy but it happens.”
Melissa was in charge of the bakery aspect of Andrew’s Pizza and Bakery until McElderry fired her in 2000. Her mistake: She had two kids and McElderry and Melissa both decided their two daughters – Lydia and Katherine – needed their mother more than the restaurant needed a baker. They dropped the bakery late last year. Melissa has since developed her own wedding cake business, which currently has so much demand, she enjoys the luxury of choosing her clients.
McElderry’s entrepreneurial ambitions have spread as well. He also owns Hood River Cinema and has 48 total employees. This entrepreneurialism is a talent he attributes to his father who has owned his own restaurant and hotel. “I’ve always been a numbers guy,” he said. “You can speculate on numbers all you want. But sooner or later, you have to go for it.”
Still $200,000 is a lot of money for a pizza restaurant, especially when chicken is more expensive than it has been in five years, pork is up 19 cents per pound and cheese costs $1 more per pound right now than it did last year this time.
McElderry has other concerns as well. Pasquale’s and the Hood River Bagel Company have both been attracting downtown customers for much of the last decade. Taco Del Mar, opened up a shop across the street from Andrew’s two April’s ago. And Pasquale’s and Taco Del Mar are both plainly visible from any window seat inside Andrew’s Pizza, and that’s excluding Pietro’s Pizza, which offers a variation of the same menu just a block and-a-half away. When he opened in 1991, he was one of three or four shops that offered espresso in the immediate downtown vicinity. Thirteen years later, that number has quadrupled. But then again, back then, he had just a few tables, a bar counter, some stools, and a mezzanine.
“This is definitely a risk,” he said. “There is no sure thing. I would be a fool to not be nervous. But his town has had something good for me since I moved here.
Karma. I believe in it.”
