Pizza Design: Cool Ideas for Your Pizzeria

Pizza design ideas for interior and exterior branding can help differentiate your restaurant and make you stand out. With the pizza industry being so competitive, these cool examples of pizza restaurant design can help you attract guests.

Design the Inside Bringing the Outside In

What do you do with an edgy location?  If you’re a pizzeria named Dough, you pull the edge inside.  Dough establishes itself as a well-worn part of its urban community with exposed brick walls, concrete floors and pasted-up posters.  The result?  Raw.  Simple.  Relaxed.

pizzeria from the interior

Design your Pizzeria with a Local Theme

The UK city of Plymouth is home to the Royal Navy.  It’s also home to Pizza Express, which has doffed its hat in the form of a maritime theme. Here, you’ll find wavy walls, shiver-me-timbers timber, and a large rose “tattooed” right on the woodwork.

Your Pizza Restaurant Could Have an Industrial and Comfortable Interior Design  

Right smack in the heart of Shanghai, you’ll find Matto Bar and Pizzeria, a mash-up of the organic and the industrial, the dark, and the playful, dark and eclectic comfort.  The idea?  Create an environment as surprising and comfortable as the food.

Create a Sophisticated and Whimsy Restaurant Interior

Subtle colors and lacy chandeliers create quiet sophistication at the Dutch pizzeria Fabbrica.  But this place doesn’t take itself too seriously.  Ladders up to personal tree-house-like pods bring unmistakable whimsy.

Some Players Have the Interior Design for their Pizza Shop Be Fully Transparent

If they see it, they will come.  That’s the logic behind the Domino’s Pizza restaurant revamp.  New store design plans include a viewing area in which pizza lovers can see the art of the dough, first hand.

The Menu Can Do a Lot for your Pizzeria

Another way to freshen up a look:  freshen up the menu.  San Francisco’s Patxi’s Pizzeria recently added unexpected new small plates including a pickled pepperoncini chop salad.

The Restaurant Design Could Leverage the Brand Personality

If you’re known for your adventurous signature pizzas, a 50-foot whimsical mural by a local Florida artist becomes part your new pizzeria prototype.  The Loop Pizza Grill also boasts huge windows, big beams, and 4000 square feet of warehouse space.

Design a Signature Smell

Want your guests to remember the unmistakable aroma of your freshly baking dough long after they’ve gone home?  Take a cue from this Canadian pizzeria: offer Eau de Pizza Hut.

Style Your Pizzeria to Make Guests Feel Welcome

Enter Australia’s Pizza Farro, and you’ll see a ceiling of vintage wooden rolling pins.  Hundreds of them.  The effect is homey and unstudied, rustic, warm, and sentimental.  Which is exactly what the stylists intended.

Modern Design: Think Outside the Pizza Box

A no-nonsense, ready-to-feed-you vibe starts with the tomato sauce can walls at Shumis Pizzeria in Israel.  It’s a funky visual aesthetic that gives new life to the term “pizza joint.”

To design a pizza box you need to consider the material (most boxes are created of corrugated cardboard), size, and graphic elements (such as logo and branding elements).

Many pizzerias offer a “create your own” pizza design. To design a pizza, customers can choose the size, the base or type of crust (hand-tossed, thin, tall), the sauce, the cheese, and toppings.  

The first thing to define is the brand (personality, vision, mission, promise). The menu  would follow. And the design (interior and exterior) comes after. The design should tell the brand story, take into account the type of service (is it going to be mostly delivery? Full-service?), and the guest experience. Technology is increasingly becoming part of pizza brands as well, so plan ahead to enable that.

Kitchen design has to be functional. They go hand in hand with operations, making sure the team is going to be able to expedite and work efficiently while considering safety. Some of the elements to consider in the layout are walk-in coolers, equipment (dough presses, ovens), assembly lines, and packaging areas.

About Aaron Allen & Associates

Aaron Allen & Associates works alongside senior executives of the world’s leading foodservice and hospitality companies to help them solve their most complex challenges and achieve their most ambitious aims. We have helped clients with deep-dive corporate intelligence, portfolio optimization strategies, data-driven diagnostics, advanced analytics, and holistic approaches to business and brand strategy.

Our clients span six continents and 100+ countries, collectively posting more than $300b in revenue. Across 2,000+ engagements, we’ve worked in nearly every geography, category, cuisine, segment, operating model, ownership type, and phase of the business life cycle.