About the author💡Jack Lander is the co-founder and managing director of Bristol-based pizza chain Pizzarova. He’s helped it grow from a mobile pizza oven in a Land Rover to a four-restaurant success story, all while staying true to their ethos of good-mood food, in a relaxed, warm environment, using high quality local suppliers. Jack credits his brilliant team as the company’s most significant achievement.
We sat down with him to talk about the most important piece of paper in your restaurant – the menu, and how to make it a tasty proposition to customers, and the business.
First up, with something like pizza, how do you manage to balance innovation and simplicity on a menu?
When it comes to balancing innovation and simplicity, there’s a pizza purist answer and then there’s a Pizzarova answer! We’ve just launched our version of a BBQ base, made in-house with tomato, paprika, sugar, and other bits, then cooked down into something unique. It’s not the sticky, sweet stuff you’d buy off the shelf. Next month, we’re doing an American-style special in collaboration with a local bagel company.
For us, it’s about pushing boundaries – taking those nostalgic, indulgent flavours people love and recreating them with quality ingredients. It’s like what happened with burgers: you can still get that indulgence, but it’s made with local produce and care, so you don’t feel gross afterwards.
That said, if I’m eating at Pizzarova, I’m probably ordering a Margarita with Parmesan and chilli. Simple always wins when the base ingredients are great.
How do you develop and test menu specials?
It takes a long time. We usually have 10-12 specials in development at any one time. We try to collaborate as much as possible to open up new audiences and add a bit of personality. Take the bagel brand I mentioned – they’ll do a spin on one of our pizzas too, so it’s mutual.
It’s not just about creating something cool, it has to be viable. We’ve come up with some great ideas that just don’t work at the price point. We’re not in the business of charging an extortionate amount for a pizza. So we have to be clever with ingredients, sometimes turning something overlooked into pesto, for example.
It’s a collaborative thing. Tom, our Head of Pizza, leads development. He puts in all the hard work, and then a small group – maybe eight of us – test and give feedback. We’ve also got a couple of ‘pizza champions’ in each site who get looped in. It means we get a broad range of opinions, which is important. Food is so subjective, and we want our decisions to reflect our customers, not just our own taste.
In the end only around 50% of those specials we’re working on make it into development. Sometimes we’ll bring something back that we shelved two years ago and rework it. The creative process takes time, and the challenge is finding something genuinely different when, at the end of the day, it's dough with stuff on top.
Is menu-planning more instinctive or data-driven?
Gut instinct is key for me. The problem is, that’s not scalable. You can’t present a gut feeling to a board or investors—it’s not a good ‘slide deck’ answer. But it’s real. It’s why scaling hospitality while keeping the soul of the business intact is so hard. Data should support your gut, not override it. I’ve seen businesses go all-in on data and lose consistency – and ultimately, their identity.
The ideal scenario for our team is building instinct through engaging with data. When something’s not working, the data gives us a place to start. But then it’s about asking why and digging into context. Data can’t tell you someone’s skill level, or how a team dynamic is affecting performance. That’s where experience and instinct come in – especially on the people's side. It's hard to quantify.
What role does data play in our menu?
It’s a big part of it, but not the main driver. We want it to back up theories more than it forms them. You need to be aware of what’s selling and what’s not, but we also factor in customer feedback, seasonality, and trends. Sometimes you get one piece of feedback that makes you question something, but then the data shows it’s actually doing great overall. So it keeps you balanced.
How do you keep quality high while managing price points?
We’ve absorbed a fair bit of the cost. But we’ve also been smart about it. Pizza’s a good category in that sense – yes, flour, oil, and milk have gone up, but we started from a relatively low base cost. Compare that to something like beef, where even a small increase can blow out your margins.
We’ve also built strong supplier relationships. We’ve used the same mozzarella supplier for 10 years. We don’t just push for the best price—we have open conversations with them. We ask: “How can we make your life easier so you can help us?” That collaborative approach has been a win-win. We get better pricing, and they get a reliable partner.
For more advice on building a successful hospitality brand, make sure to check out the other blogs in Nory’s Operator to Operator series:
Creating a cult following: Building brand loyalty in the beverage industry
From one site to many: 5 lessons in scaling hospitality operations
The real cost of manual operations: an expert’s perspective