8 hours Ago By Rebecca Mitchell
ROCHESTER — When Pi Day comes around, people might question if it’s math, sweet pie or pizza pie as the slice above the rest. At Pi Wood-Fired Pizza in Rochester, the answers are pizza and math with a dash of community thrown into the equation. The day on Friday, March 14 — 3/14 — serves as a food fundraiser for the Ronald McDonald House and 125 Live with the added draw of a $3.
14 margherita pizza. People can bring canned or dried goods to purchase the discounted pizzas. The restaurant, by Target north at 3932 Market Place Drive NW, is open 11 a.
m. to 9 p.m.
daily. ADVERTISEMENT “(The community) portion of it is just so exciting and it just gives you a little faith in humanity, right?” said Charles Morris of Creative Cuisine, which owns Pi Pizza. “You see a lot of bad things across .
.. social media, things like that, and then you do events like this and you’re like ‘There’s a lot of really good people that want to help others.
’ ...
We’re a company that wants to help others as much as we can in the community that we live in.” Morris said the team prepares batches of dough and pizza sauce in the days leading up to the event. The preparation and social media posting amounts to about 80 hours.
“We basically almost quadruple our order for food, mainly tomatoes, cheese, flour,” Morris said. People can purchase up to six discounted pizzas. He also described the day as an “all hands-on-deck type situation” with triple the amount of staff.
Staff from Creative Cuisine’s other restaurants, which include Newt’s, City Market, The Redwood Room, Purple Goat, Big Head Burrito and Tilda’s Pizzeria, will join on Friday. After selling 1,007 pizzas in 2024, and collecting as many donated goods, Morris said they hope to sell at least 1,000 pizzas on Friday. The team prepared 1,500 pizza doughs on Tuesday and Wednesday.
“What it takes is a ton of preparation, it’s insane. The dough portion alone, it just takes up so much room and so much time,” Morris said. The dough is stored in stacks of containers in a commercial refrigerator.
“These guys are making dough for two days prior to hopefully get us through that day (and the weekend).” Pi Pizza was founded by Linda Black who also owned Tilda’s Pizzeria and co-owns the national franchise Smokin’ Oak Wood-Fired Pizza with Matt Mongoven. Creative Cuisine, which Black’s brothers of the Currie family own, added Pi Pizza in 2024.
ADVERTISEMENT Black also created the Pi Day fundraiser more than 10 years ago. Morris credits Black for her pizza dough recipe, which is regularly made a few days in advance to prepare for the high temperature of the wood-fired oven. “She’s definitely got it down to a science.
She did very well with it,” Morris said of Black running Pi Day. “We’re hoping to carry that on as best we can.” They’re ready to support the community need of people experiencing food insecurity with their 1,500 kneaded pizza doughs — and 15 laundry baskets to transport the donated food items.
“I hope that the community comes together,” Morris said. He added Purple Goat hosts an Oktoberfest for suicide prevention fundraiser. “It’s always just kind of like a communal type atmosphere that’s really cool because everybody knows there’s needs for things like that and want to help out.
”.
