Running a pizza shop alone at 6 p.m. on a Friday is really five simultaneous jobs: processing orders, stretching dough, prepping and baking, boxing pizzas, and running orders out to the patio and neighboring bar. Craig Melillo, 36, did this by himself at Gracie’s Apizza, his wood-fired pizza shop in North Portland, from 2020 to 2022. “Make one mistake, and you’re in trouble,” he says. “Sometimes I was truly running.”

Melillo wore a fitness tracker and discovered that he was clocking 100 miles a week. “It was a wild dance,” says Melillo’s then-roommate, Dame restaurateur Jane Smith. “Only someone with really strong kitchen and organization skills can do that. There can’t be any wasted movement.”  

He was accustomed to solo restaurant work from Gracie’s beginnings as a one-man food cart, though by 2019 he had expanded to a staff of six and a small brick-and-mortar restaurant in St. Johns. Then came the pandemic, and he decided to stay in business by going solitary, made feasible by internet ordering. “That really helped. Half of my orders were preordered online, so I started the night with half of my tickets already planned out.” Amid pandemic isolation, he interacted with dozens daily and, for the first time in his two-decade restaurant career, put faces to the names on orders. And he had stumbled onto a functional business model: unlike the hair-thin profits of most restaurants, working alone was profitable enough that Melillo no longer needed to work full weeks.

His work days began with an hour of dough prep around 7 a.m. He returned at noon, opened at 5 p.m., and left around 8:30. (He hired a nighttime dishwasher.) After these Wednesday-through-Saturday stints, he returned home exhausted, and began tinkering with his recovery routine. “He got very into cold showers, and got rid of his phone, which was super annoying for his friends because we couldn’t send him photos,” Smith says with a laugh. “But he was stripping [his life] down, so that he could add things of value, like reading. And he was also stripping down his business.”

There were hazards. “I had moments of chasing someone down the street to give them their order, dodging people and dogs, and running back in for the pizzas in the oven,” he says. One day the dough didn’t rise properly—he still doesn’t know why—but he’d already sold out. His then-new girlfriend texted and called customers to cancel orders. 

And he was lonely in a small space. “I’d be sold out at 6:30 yet I had an empty restaurant. And it was really a bummer. I hated putting pizzas in boxes.” With his therapist, he practiced how to make short interactions meaningful by being “really earnest,” and decided to upgrade to a larger space a few blocks away—and was surprised that his one-man-band days promptly ceased. “I was going to keep the same model. But the new space is more spread out, and people eat in—so there’s no way.” 

He now runs a lean operation, informed by his solo days. The pizzeria is open just 12 hours a week (Wednesday through Saturday, 5–8 p.m.) and his three or four part-time employees work a cumulative 30–40 hours: all take orders, make sides, run tables, and do dishes; another with a day job comes on Fridays and Saturdays to learn pizzamaking. “She’s incredible. And we all have flexibility—I can close when I need to and nobody minds, and they get every day off that they request.” Melillo believes he has landed on the future of hiring for small restaurants like his. 

“The best part is that I don’t have people dragging themselves to work 35 hours a week,” he says. “They love coming to Gracie’s. It’s so nice to have people who are full of joy to be here.”