I recently had the opportunity to chat with Marlee, La Morra Pizzeria’s co-founder. It was inspiring to hear her story and learn how she and her partner Zach have worked to bring their dream to life. It all started with a late night conversation and a backyard pizza oven. Now, La Morra is changing the way people experience wood-fired pizza across LA.
The following are excerpts from my conversation with Marlee. She’s a passionate entrepreneur who is always on the lookout for new sources of inspiration to make delicious, high-quality pizza accessible to anyone at any time.
Cecy: Tell me more about the story behind La Morra. How did you and your partner get into pizza?
Marlee: Totally. So, the story of La Morra... I'll try to keep it somewhat short and sweet, but essentially La Morra is the product of Zach and myself, two restaurant professionals having spent a long time in New York, and Zach was in San Francisco for some time. Always working for other people, you know, with a very busy lifestyle as both chef and front of the house in the restaurant industry. We decided we wanted a bit of a change of pace. So, we moved down to Charleston, South Carolina for about a year with no real roots or connections whatsoever to the town. We just wanted a brief change of pace and during our time there is where La Morra was built and born. We had some spare time on our hands and we knew we weren't going to be there long-term.
Zach was very eager to start cooking pizza. I think this is common, and now you see it even more than you did at the time. You know, food trucks definitely existed and mobile operations definitely existed, but there wasn't a ton of that going on in the pizza world. I think the biggest problem is that entrepreneurs and people in the restaurant industry are eager to begin creating their products, but they either don't have the space or the equipment to do it. And so, Zach knew with the pizza, the key would be to make a wood fired oven. It really starts with this vessel being the oven. You can't do anything without the oven.
We knew we didn't want to lay the groundwork for a long-term space there and put all of our energy solely into that, so he (Zach) literally gets this idea one night, laying in bed, we were just talking and he says, "what if I hand build a wood fired pizza oven? And we just started making pizza? And I build it onto a mobile trailer in the backyard?" I don't think he had thought about it that much, but it really just started from a conversation and an idea. I think I kind of shut it off and at that moment said, "That’s a funny idea. All right, goodnight, we'll talk about this later." From there, I think it was really cool to see how the idea progressed from that point. It was really indicative of our working relationship now. He had this creative idea where he really wanted to get his hands involved and ended up creating, designing, and building top to bottom, this beautiful pizza oven. To this day, we get inquiries from people who ask, "Do you custom sell these, how can I get my own?" So he formed that and in the meantime, I was figuring out if this actually was a real business that could generate some sort of a profit.
Zach is definitely the creator in terms of creating the food, the recipes, and the visions. He prefers to be working with his hands... I think he is your classic idea of what a chef or a kitchen professional or artist might be. And then on the other side, I deal with everything from marketing to just crafting the overall business strategy for our company.
So it literally was born in the backyard. No business plan, no preconceived ideas, it was really just about the food and creating this product that we knew we had and wanted to get to people. We just needed the how - how are we going to get it to them? So it all started with the oven.
Cecy: Besides the fact that this pizza obviously has an amazing story, what would you say makes them so special? Why are they different from the rest?
Marlee: I think it's twofold, but if we start with a tangible idea of why the product is different, it's all sourdough. So basically, Zach devised an initial dough recipe that we still use today. Not to say it was exactly the way we wanted it to be on day one. I think it evolved a little bit, but ultimately he's still using the same recipe he crafted in those early days. So from a food recipe standpoint, Zach's background and skills developed from working in different cuisines. You see a lot of pizza people come at this angle for the dough influenced from maybe personal baking experience or they hire a baker, or they're following this very specific model of how bread is supposed to be made to form their pizza.
Zach, on the other hand, three years prior had been studying how to nixtamalize corn and make a corn tortilla from scratch. He had opened a restaurant for a popular chef in New York at the time. So part of Zach's job there was to spearhead this whole program. He spent some time in Mexico and just really took in the process and perfected and made these gorgeous, melt-in-your-mouth, corn tortillas. His time spent working on that gave him this really unique perspective into the way he looks at the dough and the recipe and the handling of everything top to bottom, rather than approaching it from your very classically trained baker's perspective.
That's a really special aspect of the product and also what makes it so light and digestible and delicious. And then in terms of the toppings, we're always using high-quality ingredients but, it's also the handling of them and the way you're piecing the flavors together. He believes in looking at every ingredient as something that should shine independently. I think he approaches it from the place of creating a dish and the mentality that every ingredient should be seasoned, every ingredient should independently taste good. So I think it's the dough, the topping selection, and Zach’s mentality on ingredients.
And then I think in terms of our place in the market and the way we hope to reach people, we aim to bring it back to the very foundational roots of pizza - as a very approachable, accessible item. I think we have seen over the past five to ten years in the food scene that pizza has become an unattainable, very expensive, reservation only, no modification type of product. I think we saw that happen in some bigger cities especially. But what we wanted to do, instead, is bring you this really great product with ease. If you want to order a meat lover's pizza, we're not going to say no. We want to give you a meat lover's pizza, but we are going to give you the best version, with the best quality pork we've sourced for the sausage that we make in-house and our favorite pepperoni. So basically, allowing you to lean into that nostalgia that you have for pizza and make it exactly how you want it. We want it to taste good to you and nostalgic to you and for you to be able to customize really great pizza in a way that you can't always do at a restaurant.
Cecy: This is awesome Marlee. I'm actually Mexican so it's nice to relate with that part of Zach's background.
Marlee: Oh, nice. Where in Mexico?
Cecy: I was born in Mexico City but grew up in Puerto Vallarta. Then moved back to Mexico City for college.
Marlee: Okay. Yeah. Zach spent some time in Mexico City and Oaxaca. He's traveled to quite a few other places, but he's like "I think Mexico city and Oaxaca was my favorite experience to date and maybe my favorite place I've ever traveled." He was so enamored with the culture and the food, and the warmth and color, and the market, and just everything it had to offer.
Cecy: Yeah, and I feel being exposed to different cultures and different techniques is a true source of inspiration.
Marlee: Totally. I mean, little things like every once in a while, if he's talking through a process, he'll reference something he picked up in a cuisine and it's not necessarily always of Italian influence. It might be an Italian dish he's making, but the technique for the way he builds the flavors might be referenced by something he learned in Mexico. I think that's the testament of a great cook, the ability to pick up techniques from different areas and be able to merge them into one dish. It doesn't matter what cuisine it's necessarily inspired by or where the recipes come from, but being able to merge techniques is really cool.
Cecy: This might be more of a question for Zach but where does he get his inspiration? Every time he wants to come up with a new pizza or a new flavor, where does this inspiration come from?
Marlee: Honestly, I think that's something that comes from conversations over the dinner table, in the car, modifications and requests from our customers. It's typically just boiled down to us having a conversation about something we think we want to do and it’s nice just bouncing ideas off of each other. And then, if I have any input I'm usually relying on Zach to go back to the drawing board and realistically bring it together with his knowledge. It's quite casual I would say, and a lot of it comes from merging different cultural ideas and things he's learned along the way, like we were just talking about.
People will always say, "Oh, you make pizza. Did you study pizza in Italy?" And he's like "Nope. I went to Italy. If by study you mean eating and drinking a ton, absolutely! But no formal training there." I think we have the same, very casual approach when we approach a recipe or a new pizza topping. It's just very casual, not refined or drawn out by any means. Maybe that's not the most exciting answer, but it's the truth. It usually comes from a place where we want to make something that tastes good.
Just to give you a quick example - We were just eating some pepperoncini from a jar at lunch, store-bought from a nice brand and Zach just said: "What about a pizza that's just covered in pepperoncini, not too spicy." And I was like "Oh yeah, remember the time we did this with this." And it usually starts like that. So yeah, just inspired by what we want to eat.
Cecy: That is awesome! And what is your favorite pizza flavor?
Marlee: I go in waves with our pizza. My favorite hands down and I don't think it gets enough attention (I don't know why, because it's just a classic cheese pizza) is the Five Cheese! I think we see a lot more excitement over the Pepperoni and the Margherita, but the five cheese to me is like our version of basically everything you wanted a kid's cheese pizza to be in your childhood life, meeting your adult life and giving it a little bit of a boost of elegance with our awesome ingredients. But the cheese pizza is so satisfying to me. We actually had it for dinner last night, we're hooked!
Cecy: Yum! So, how many times a week do you have pizza?
Marlee: At least one? Sometimes more! When we were actively in the shop I was eating pizza five days a week. And that's the other thing that is really nice about our frozen product. I think it's so rare to find a frozen product that doesn't weigh you down, doesn't make you feel poorly the next day, and isn’t loaded with sodium or horrible ingredients. Our pizza is still a really fresh product! Our hope is that it's the best pizza in town coming right out of your freezer. Maybe you don't have a local pizzeria on speed dial that you really like, where you can eat and it tastes good and you feel good. Maybe that's not an option for you, so your go-to for pizza night when you don't want to get in your car and drive 30 minutes is LA MORRA frozen pizzas. That's the vision for our pizza and that's definitely what they provide for us right now. We don't live in a neighborhood with great pizzas so that's our pizza night once a week for sure!
Cecy: I agree. I've tried the pepperoni pizza and it's amazing!
Marlee: Nice, good! My top two are the vegan and the five cheese. The vegan is another one I think people are scared of. Just imagine a really good veggie pizza. Our dough is so flavorful and the tomato sauce is so good and acidic and nicely seasoned on its own, that you just add all these marinated veggies on top and you have such a delicious product. If I do the vegan, I'll dip it into something creamy like vegan garlic dip, or if I have ranch available I'll dip it in the ranch because it doesn't have the cheese. It's a nice pairing!
Cecy: Good tip I'll definitely try it out! I have one last question for you Marlee: What has been your favorite day at La Morra since you started and why?
Marlee: Oh gosh, that's a tough question. What has been my favorite day? I would say my most rewarding and favorite experience in La Morra is always when I feel we're reaching new people in some capacity, because like I said, I think the core of our business is just accessibility. We became really disenchanted with how good pizza was becoming generally less accessible, right? So, unless you can make a reservation a month in advance in LA, you're not going to be able to eat at any of the nice pizza places, and unless you can spend a hundred dollars on that dinner, you may never get to try it. So for me, the most exciting, most rewarding is when I feel like we're reaching a new audience, whether that's a new person in the neighborhood, a new demographic, a new neighborhood, a new state, a new age group... any of the above.
So during the pandemic, very early on, we started working with a community, Nickerson Gardens, in Watts in south LA and we were just distributing our frozen pizzas to the neighborhood and all of the kids there. So we became very intertwined with some of the foundational members of the community there and began distributing our pizzas to people that were in need of some extra support with their weekly groceries.
One day we were doing our weekly rounds and one of the grandmothers came through and told us how her grandson didn't understand why there were black spots on the crust. He said "Why does a pizza look like that? I've never seen pizza that looks like that before." And we were just like "Wait, but did he eat it?" And then she's like "Yeah, he ate it. And he loved it!" And we were just so inspired by the fact that we were able to, now that our product was in frozen form, give someone this experience without having to drive somewhere outside of their neighborhood and try a new wood-fired pizza place that they maybe would've never been able to go to. Instead, we had this little frozen 12 inch circle that could now reach this area that we hadn't been before and deliver a new experience to someone, especially a young boy. Maybe we're shaping the way you look at pizza in some capacity. And it sounds really silly, but I think pizza's so universal. It's a really great way to bring the initial first experience to someone. It's like trying to force a kale salad upon someone who's never eaten a vegetable in their life. You can't start with a kale salad, right? Maybe you could start with a potato or an avocado and be like "Did you know this is a vegetable?" Instead, with pizza, you can really get anyone to try it at least once. So I would say that was a very exciting day and I'm most rewarded and excited when we just meet someone new, we reach someone new, we influence someone's idea of pizza. I love that!
Cecy: Love it! And that's really how word of mouth starts.
Marlee: Exactly. And I think that's our vision. One day we would like to have a lot of smaller shops in many neighborhoods and not limit it. I think for a long time we had dreams of having that one centralized, really big fancy restaurant. And then we said, you know, that's never really been our goal or our intention. We've always wanted to reach as many people as possible and not limit it to this one place at one time. Instead, we'd rather be able to reach as many people as we can. Long term we're going to be able to reach more people and get good pizza in more places that solely rely on the normal big box chains at this point. Little Caesars, Domino's, or Papa John's, which just aren't good and aren't good for you. Maybe they're still good for a slice every now and then but then you might feel awful after. I totally understand someone at this point who still has a soft spot for that product. Our goal is basically to come in and be the new alternative to that and say "Hey, we're here to give you a better option and we're gonna make it just as easy to get, we'll have parking, we'll have an app, you can order online.” I think you see a lot of the big box brands continue to shine because they're accessible and they're easy to get to. And that's what most of the population wants: affordability and ease. They're busy, they're working and taking care of their families and it's hard for them to worry about hunting down the best pizza. So we just want to make it easy. I would say that's our goal.
Marlee: We are in the process of building some exciting things that we hope we will be able to bring to LA by the end of the year. No real timeline or real news to share yet, but we are very excited! Hopefully we'll have more soon.
Thank you to Marlee for letting me get the inside scoop of how these amazing pizzas came to life! I can't wait to see what Marlee and Zach are building. La Morra is turning the concept of frozen pizza on its head and it has now become a perennial favorite for Locale customers and a staple in my freezer. Time to fire up the oven!
