Pizza Express tries expansion again

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This article was published 16/01/2023 (1087 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gus Vasilarakis is in the middle of bringing Pizza Express and Submarine back to the people of Winnipeg, more than 20 years after he sold his two locations in the busy capital city and returned to work exclusively out of Brandon.

However, the local business owner believes this attempt at expansion will be different, especially now that his 33-year-old son Tony has taken up the family business and is working directly by his side.

“I can’t even sleep at night, I’m so excited,” Gus told the Sun this past Saturday.

For the last couple of months, the father-son team have been shuttling back and forth from Brandon to Winnipeg to oversee the new Pizza Express storefront at 3116 Roblin Blvd., which used to house another pizza joint.

While this process has been littered with delays, the elder Vasilarakis said over the weekend that they are finally making headway on these renovations, so much so that they could be opening in early February.

“By the end of [this] week, the kitchen will be ready, and the following week we’ll start getting all the food in the building and preparing everything and training some employees,” Gus said.

Pizza Express has been a staple of Brandon’s culinary scene since 1982, when the Vasilarakis family first opened the business after emigrating from Greece.

Once Gus took over operations from his uncle Antonios later that decade, he decided to move everything over to Winnipeg, eventually opening a dining room location on Portage Avenue and a takeout restaurant on St. Anne’s Road.

Even though the family did experience success for a time, Gus admits that it all became a little too much to handle, partially due to his own inexperience in the industry and some economic factors beyond his control.

“It was hard to get going back in the ’90s because it was a recession time during the years that we were open,” he said.

“It was definitely more stressful back then because I was fairly young and I wasn’t very familiar with the dining room aspect of the business.”

By the late 1990s, Gus decided to sell his two locations in Winnipeg and move back to Brandon, picking up where he originally left off.

Pizza Express continued to chug along in the Wheat City during the next two decades, with the business getting a new shot of energy in 2012 when Tony decided to become the general manager and co-owner with his dad.

By working together, Gus and Tony continued to cement the restaurant’s impressive legacy in the community, being named the 2017 Manitoba Family Enterprise of the Year by the Family Enterprise Xchange.

Because of this sturdy foundation, the Vasilarakis family believe their chances at successfully expanding into Winnipeg are much higher this time around, especially with a solid menu that they’ve been able to fine tune over the years.

“Our job is to try and replicate that as best as we possibly can,” Tony said.

“We’ll see how it goes, and we’re always looking to add new things and tweak new things here and there to make things more efficient. But I think we’re pretty confident to keep our menu as close to what we have in Brandon as we can in Winnipeg.”

However, one thing they wanted to make perfectly clear is they do not plan on abandoning their loyal Brandon customers during this expansion.

Tony claims they will be able to run both locations simultaneously by mixing veteran employees with new hires in Winnipeg, all the while making sure that some key people stay behind in Brandon to oversee the day-to-day operation.

“And we’re super comfortable with them being able to manage the daily operations here without everything completely unravelling,” the junior Vasilarakis said.

“We’ve worked really hard in the last couple of years to kind of put that stuff in place so that we could pursue this project.”

Moving forward, Gus and Tony aren’t counting out the possibility of setting up multiple Pizza Express locations in Winnipeg, although the viability of that kind of growth will be determined in the coming months and years.

But for right now, they are just thankful for this opportunity to expand at all, especially after so many small businesses have gone under due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s been an interesting ride the last few years with COVID and everything else,” Tony said. “Everyone’s had their challenges and delays and all the stuff that comes with it. So we’re just happy that things seem to be a little bit more normal now, and we’re looking forward to what’s ahead.”

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

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