WALNUT CREEK, CALIFORNIA – When I met Tony Gemignani at the opening of Slice House in Livermore, he shared something that surprised me.
The little Slice House in downtown Walnut Creek, he told me, was the brand’s highest-selling location.
If you’ve been inside, you know why that caught my attention. The pizza shop at 1500 Mt. Diablo Boulevard is miniscule, at around 900 SqFt. There’s barely room for a few tables and a short line-up area.
Yet, it has apparently played an enormous role in a business that now stretches across California and beyond.
To learn more about how the tiny WC shop helped launch a pizza empire, I spoke with Slice House co-founder George Karpaty.
“Yeah, it’s the busiest location from a sales standpoint, without a doubt, ” Karpaty confirmed to me.
And its size?
“It is by far the smallest store,” he said.
That combination helped set something much bigger in motion.
The little shop that helped launch an empire
First, an important piece of pizza history: Slice House began in San Francisco.
Karpaty made a point of emphasizing that the original location, next door to Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, deserves credit for starting the concept.
Walnut Creek came later. But the Walnut Creek shop helped convince the partners that they had a business worth taking much farther. In short, it helped them grow an empire.
Surprisingly, the growth began with COVID. Like most restaurants, Slice House initially faced huge uncertainty as the pandemic unfolded. At the time, it was the only other location of Slice House, besides the original one in the city.
Walnut Creek’s Slice House adjusted amazingly fast. As restaurants scrambled to adapt to pandemic restrictions, Slice House already had a format built around quick service and food that could travel, Karpaty told me.
“When COVID came, it taught us that fast casual and delivery might be a wave of the future,” he said. “And we were already doing that, because it’s what pizza places naturally already did.”
Without knowing it, Slice House had built a model focused on selling pizza by the slice and embracing delivery that was ideal for the pandemic itself, and for the post-pandemic restaurant world.
The Walnut Creek location demonstrated the value of that model, and clued in Gemignani, Karparty and their partners that it was time to scale up.
Fast forward to today, and the company’s list of open locations includes California communities from Rohnert Park to San Diego, along with restaurants in states including Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas. Closer to home, that list includes Livermore, Castro Valley and San Leandro.
The company has also announced an October 2026 opening in Brentwood.
The empire has grown well beyond Walnut Creek. But despite all the new shops, according to Karpaty, its little downtown WC shop still leads the way in sales.
“Times Square of the East Bay”
So what makes this particular Slice House work?
Karpaty had a memorable description of its location.
“It’s Times Square of the East Bay.”
He sees the restaurant as sitting at the intersection of the things that bring people downtown: shopping, work, restaurants and the city itself.
“Walnut Creek is a beautiful place,” he said. “There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of reasons to be there.”
The building helps, too. Slice House occupies the ground floor of the distinctive three-story restaurant building at Mt. Diablo Boulevard and Main Street, with Teleferic Barcelona upstairs.
The City of Walnut Creek has highlighted the building’s role in restaurant expansion. Developed by BH Development on a former city-owned parking lot, it also became the home of Teleferic Barcelona’s first U.S. restaurant in 2016.
That makes this one downtown corner a particularly productive place for a restaurant to get its footing.
Karpaty also credits the people working inside Slice House’s compact space.
“Hats off to the team that works there, because I’m not sure there’s a lot of people that can even pull it off,” he said.
It still comes down to the pizza
Of course, a good corner only gets you so far. Walnut Creek has plenty of places to order Italian food or a pizza.
When I asked what makes Slice House stand out in a city with 14 different Italian and pizza restaurants, Karpaty’s answer came quickly.
“Tony Gemignani. I mean, it’s Tony Gemignani. It’s the product.”
As someone who comes from the East Coast, I understand the appeal. Pizza is something of a way of life there, and finding East Coast-style pizza I loved on the West Coast was a challenge. Slice House was the first place where I felt I’d found it.
Even a successful pizza shop has to contend with downtown’s frustrations, though.
“Without a doubt, parking is challenging,” Karpaty acknowledged.
Delivery accounts for a substantial part of the business, he said. But he believes easier parking would help businesses throughout the area.
There’s also a gigantic new building planned for the lot right next to Slice House. Karpaty wasn’t concerned, though. He felt that new neighbors meant more potential people to eat his pizza!
Growing without crowding itself
For all the expansion, Karpaty says the aim is to give individual restaurants room.
The company has made a deliberate decision to avoid putting locations too close together, he told me.
“The goal is not the number of units I have, but how successful the ones I have are.”
He is more welcoming when it comes to other restaurant concepts arriving in Walnut Creek, though. More good food gives people more reasons to visit, he believes.
“No matter how good you are, no one’s coming to me seven days a week,” he said. “They’ve got to try something else.”
For Karpaty, that is part of what makes the city work.
“If Walnut Creek is a hub for good food, I’m happy to be a part of that hub.”
