Zeeks Pizza is officially open in Tacoma, which means that Elemental Pizza is now closed
It’s official. With the swap of a sign and the addition of a few huge, new pizza ovens, Zeeks Pizza opened in downtown Tacoma Monday (Aug. 27) at 1702 Pacific Ave. The restaurant will operate daily from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
The Tacoma outpost is the first in Pierce County for the Seattle-based pizza restaurant. It took over the Elemental Pizza restaurant space. That restaurant operated from 2015 until Aug. 18 when it exited downtown Tacoma.
The behind-the-scenes transition to Zeeks happened over a few months, but the big work was from Aug. 18 until Monday.
“I’m not going to lie, it was a little crazy,” said Zeeks franchisee Michael Goronkin, who will operate the restaurant with business partners Tom Matzelle and Dan Anderson, owners of Barking Dog Alehouse in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.
The decor will stay the same in the restaurant known for its modern-looking, two-story dining room. Like Elemental, Zeeks also will serve 16 craft beverages on tap. It’ll offer a menu of specialty pizzas, build-your-own pizzas, wings and salads, including a few new additions (a beet salad and a quinoa-kale salad).
The biggest change diners will notice will be that the Elemental Pizza wood-fired oven is gone. That’s because Zeeks serves an entirely different style of pizza from Elemental, which specialized in thin-crust artisan pies from a wood oven. Zeeks serves more traditional style pizza cooked in a deck oven. A pretty big one at that. The wood oven had to go.
“The wood-fired pizza oven was a five-foot oven, the external side,” said Goronkin. “It was smaller on the inside. We have two ovens. They’re double stack ovens, about 16 feet of oven. That’s four decks. We can cook 24 pies at a time.”
He added that diners will notice the ovens right away: “It’s a lot of shiny metal.”
Those huge ovens also will help Zeeks do what Elemental Pizza could not — offer a robust delivery service in downtown Tacoma and surrounding communities.
Elemental co-owner Steve Rosen said last month that his restaurant opened in Tacoma in 2015 with the intention of filling a big need in Tacoma for food delivery (at the time, at least). However, the restaurant was limited by the smaller oven and the style of pizza it served, which did not transport well, said Rosen who operates two Seattle locations with business partner James Allard.
Elemental opted to exit rather than change its recipe. Rosen said they made a strategic decision to hand over the business to a company it said would do delivery better than it ever could.
The Zeeks Pizza delivery map covers a significant slice of the Tacoma area — from Ruston and the Narrows neighborhood all the way to Fife Heights and down to Tacoma Mall, the Lincoln and McKinley neighborhoods.
Zeeks will have a grand opening celebration at 3 p.m Sept. 15, featuring a lineup of specialty craft beer brewers.
Zeeks Pizza
Where: 1702 Pacific Ave., Tacoma
Info: zeekspizza.com or 253-269-7604
Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily
This story was originally published August 27, 2018 at 12:30 PM.