Ollie's Pizza and the Wild Ride of Opening in a Pandemic

Ollie’s Pizza's August 2020 opening should have been a joyous, feel-good celebration. It involved a local boy coming home to the small Hudson Valley town of High Falls with his wife and their young daughter, for whom the restaurant is named. They and another friend renovated the 1850s barn on the site, located right in the middle of the hamlet, bringing new life and hope for a brighter future. Not to mention high-quality wood-fired pizzas, developed by one of New York City's best pizzaiolos.

Just as Innis Lawrence, Sophie Peltzer-Rollo and their friend Ilan Bachrach, partners along with Frank Pinello of Best Pizza in Brooklyn, were getting into the early stages of an ambitious renovation, the pandemic hit. Soon, indoor dining was shutting down around the state, even as the partners planned to make an Italian-designed, assembled-in-Hudson Valley Forna Forzi oven with the name Ollie’s spelled out in tiles one of the central design elements for the handsome dining room.

“We kept forging ahead,” says Peltzer-Rollo. “We had to figure out how we were going to operate without being able to serve people inside. It was what the space was meant to do and how we had envisioned it.”

Ollie’s Pizza was intended to be the realization of a dream for the three longtime friends, who’d worked in New York City restaurants, and, like others before them, tried to open their own restaurant in the less expensive but more naturally attractive Hudson Valley. Their dream, however, narrowly avoided becoming a nightmare.

For the Love of Pizza

Innis Lawrence and his father used to make pizza ovens out of mud not far from where Ollie’s now stands. They have no Italian background, but Lawrence says that he personally adopted the Italian-American penchant for Sunday gatherings around his homemade gravy. “My father’s from England and his father was a pastry chef in England,” Lawrence says. “I have no Italian cooking training but I think I’ve always wanted to be someone’s Italian grandmother. Making pizza is something I’ve always been drawn to.”

Lawrence, Peltzer-Rollo, and Bachrach, an accomplished opera singer and performer, considered putting a pizza oven on a truck and doing a natural wine and pizza pop-up in High Falls. Then, the farm and barn in the middle of High Falls came up for sale, and they opted to take on a bigger project.

Besides the barn, the property has a small field, an unusual feature given the central location in the hamlet. While nearby towns in the Hudson Valley and neighboring Catskills have become weekend destinations for New Yorkers, High Falls has remained mostly off the radar. Its business district has a deli and a few other restaurants and shops, a church, and a post office. The population is about 600.

Lawrence called on his experience as a builder and metal worker to realize the design for Ollie’s interior. “We had this blank canvas of this 1850s barn so I felt like the challenge was, how do you still make it feel somewhat rustic like you’re inside a barn but also make it feel clean,” he says.

A collector of early 20th century electric lighting, Lawrence sourced fixtures for the space, and materials including marble, steel, glass, and a lilac marble bar. “I’m really into mixing materials and not have it be too ‘matchy,’" he says.

With its high ceilings and eclectic yet elegant décor, Ollie’s dining room should have competed with the pizza. They opted to offer two styles: a wood-fired pizza that Pinello has referred to as “neo-Neapolitan” and a Roman-style or al taglio pizza cooked on trays in an electric deck oven, like a thinner-crust grandma pie.

Change of Plans

When Ollie’s was finally ready to open, its customers wouldn’t sit in the hardwood booths or stand at the bar for an aperitivo, with the Ollie’s-emblazoned oven turning out pizzas in the corner of the room. Instead, the partners closed the interior, turned the field into an outdoor dining area with plenty of wooden picnic tables, and set up a makeshift bar.

While Lawrence’s considerable design accomplishments would go unnoticed, for now at least, something unexpected happened. Hundreds of people from High Falls and its surrounding area caught wind of this new pizza joint with a spacious outdoor dining section and a beverage menu of natural wines and New York craft beers and ciders, and Ollie’s nearly became overwhelmed.

Bachrach himself had planned to leave shortly after the opening to star in an opera in Germany but ended up helping manage the crowds and running food. He says that because so many New York City residents had relocated to their country homes, or had escaped the city and rented in Hudson Valley, Ollie’s had an unexpectedly large clientele.

“Because of the pandemic, so many of those weekenders became permanent residents,” he says.

The Ollie’s team persevered with the outdoors set-up throughout the winter, taking a break only during the last two weeks of February. The restaurant reopens for pizza service this week, and will be open Thursday through Sunday for dinner. There’s also daytime coffee and pastries served seven days a week.

For now, the pizza will remain the main draw at Ollie’s, made with a long-fermented dough from local wheat and topped with ingredients from nearby farms and purveyors including vegetables from Back Home Farm a mile up the road and meats from the butcher Lunch Nightly, located 10 miles away in Kingston.

While the dining room remains closed until the partners feel comfortable operating the restaurant indoors, it hopefully won’t be long until Ollie’s becomes a draw for its charming atmosphere as well.

At least they've made it this far. When it came time to open in 2020, Peltzer-Rollo says, they didn’t know what to make of the pandemic and how it might affect their business. “It was really just fear,” she says. “Like, what’s gonna happen to the world let alone to our area. But we were too deep to stop. We just had to keep going. It was time to get open.”

And so they did.