“We set out to be the best pizza anywhere and I think we’ve done that,” said Thomas Grim, who, along with Stalin Bedon, owns Nomad Pizza.
If that’s a bold claim, it’s one that Grim can defend: Travel and Leisure Magazine cited Nomad’s Philly location as evidence in ranking that town No. 4 in the country for pizza. If Nomad, the upstart pizza parlor founded in Hopewell Borough in 2009, isn’t indisputably the best, it’s certainly up there.
Grim, of Pennington and Bedon, of Hopewell Township, have come a long way since 2007 when, with little experience making pizza, they started baking Neapolitan-style pies in their 60-year-old REO Speedwagon van. Grim envisioned the restaurant, with its small Broad Street space, as a commissary supporting the truck and maybe open a few days a week. There was just enough room in the small building for a wood-fired brick oven from Italy, a large communal table and a handful of two-seat tables.
Grim said Bedon shut down his landscaping business to open the restaurant.
“He asked me, ‘are we gonna sell any pizza here?’ I told him, ‘I don’t know. We could open up and have no one come,’” Grim recalled.
Grim was also nervous about the community table, which was then a rarity, that he considered marking borders on the wood to give patrons at least the appearance of personal space.
He needn’t have worried. From the first day, Nomad was packed, and it only got more so as word spread about the gourmet pizzas being served in the tiny restaurant.
“We were just bombarded,” he said. “It was chaos … we were totally wrong about this place.”
Almost immediately, Nomad outgrew its capacity. Last year, Grim and Bedon opened their second location, in Philadelphia, with more than three times the space of the Hopewell restaurant. Grim runs the Hopewell spot, and Bedon runs the Philly location. Grim said they are looking around for a place to build a third restaurant, run by their pizza truck manager. Grim estimates the Hopewell restaurant is too small by about 30 seats. The norm now is a two-hour wait on Saturday nights, with patrons waiting at nearby bars. There’s no fancy pager system — the host will call you on your cell phone when your table is ready.
One conspicuously absent piece of equipment at the restaurant is a credit card reader. While the Philly location takes cards, Hopewell is cash only. Grim said he will resist taking credit cards to the bitter end.
“I hate credit card companies,” he said. “they should be in jail.”
Grim said if a customer eats and then doesn’t have cash, they are asked to come back the next day and pay. Most of the time, they do, he said.
“Even if we lose some people that way, it’s still cheaper than having credit cards,” he said.
So what has people flocking to Nomad, cash in hand? Grim credit’s the restaurant’s success to its monomaniacal focus on pizza. The place serves only pizza and salad, partly due to the small kitchen, but partly to keep a purity of purpose.
“I love restaurants that focus on one thing and do it well,” he said.
Secondly, he said, the pizza recipes are the result of endless experimentation to re-create the pies found in Napoli. Chewy crust, chunky sauce and fresh buffalo mozzarella are the hallmarks of the Napoli pie, considered by some pizza aficionados to be the purest form of pizza. You don’t pick and choose toppings at Nomad, just pick a pie from a selection that has been thoughtfully designed by Grim and Bedon.
There is a semi-secret off-menu item that regulars know about : if you order your pizza Roman-style, you get a different beast entirely, with a rolled, crispy crust and edge-to-edge toppings.
Whether Roman or Neopolitan, ingredients are either locally sourced or imported from Italy. The dough is aged four days because, Grim said, if you use it on the same day, it tastes like “cardboard.”
To find the perfect tomato for the sauce, Grim tested more than 20 tomatoes until he found one that was consistently good. It’s all baked in an extremely hot wood-fired oven.
Now, he said, they have pizza down to a science.
“This is more of a lifestyle than a business for us,” he said. “It’s about the lifestyle first, and the financial thing second.”
To celebrate Nomad’s success, Grim took 10 members of the staff on a trip to Italy to meet the restaurant’s suppliers. As a purely business move, it was questionable — the trip cost a fortune in addition to having the restaurants closed for 10 days — but if Nomad really is a lifestyle before a business, it was a huge success.
“We were there for 10 days and we saw a lot of Italy and we ate some of the best pizza anywhere,” he said. “Our staff now has a better understanding of what our pizza is, where it’s from and what we’re trying to accomplish. Our customers love that we’re that involved.”
Nomad Pizza is located at10 East Broad Street in Hopewell, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday 5 to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 5 to 10 p.m. and Sunday 4 to 9 p.m.
Phone: (609) 466-6623.
