California Pizza Kitchen has a lot to be proud of.
The 41-year-old brand is best known for helping to introduce “California-style” pizza to the masses. It also raised the bar for frozen pizza and paved the way for mall restaurants as we know them today.
But its greatest legacy, at least to those close to the company, is the way it put employees on a pedestal — even more so than its customers.
“We felt if our employees came to work and were motivated and cared, then the customer would be the beneficiary,” said co-founder Rick Rosenfield. “Those are the things that we learned over time, and it was real.”
That’s the biggest lesson Rosenfield hopes readers will take away from his new book, “The California Pizza Kitchen Story.” In it, he recounts how he and fellow attorney Larry Flax created the enduring pizza brand, and what they learned along the way.
It’s an unlikely story. Rosenfield and Flax were successful federal prosecutors in Los Angeles. They’d argued cases before the Supreme Court and taken on the mob. But they had always dreamed of opening a restaurant.
In 1984, while in Chicago for a trial, they visited a cafeteria-style pasta concept called Mama Mia. Thinking it was an interesting idea, they mentioned it to Bob Mandler, another attorney, who had recently opened a contemporary Chinese place on the Sunset Strip called Chin Chin.
Mandler told them he’d just read an article (in this very publication) about a similar pasta concept in Glendale, California. Rosenfield and Flax went to investigate and discovered it was indeed like Mama Mia, except it also sold “god-awful looking pizza under heat lamps,” Rosenfield recalled. But almost every customer had a slice on their plate.
“On the way back to our office, we started bouncing around ideas and said, ‘No, let's not do this cafeteria. Let's do Chin Chin with Italian,’” Rosenfield recalled. “‘Let's put that wood-burning oven in the center of the room, and let's build a counter, and the restaurant's very family friendly, and we do full service.’”
Flax and Rosenfield helped define California-style pizza.
The first California Pizza Kitchen opened in 1985, just as California-style pizza was emerging. Pioneered by famous chefs such as Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck, these gourmet pizzas featured fresh vegetables and adventurous ingredients like goat cheese, duck, and rabbit.
One of Rosenfield and Flax’s first moves was to bring on Ed LaDou, the former pizza chef at Puck’s Spago, as a consultant. He developed what would become California Pizza Kitchen’s signature dish: the Barbecue Chicken Pizza.
Though it did not quite fit the definition of California-style pizza at the time, the popularity of Barbecue Chicken Pizza would help define the genre going forward.
“We saw very early that the innovative pizzas have to be pizzas that people want to eat, like a Thai chicken pizza, a BLT, something they hadn't seen on pizza before, but they can identify the taste,” Rosenfield said. “So we did that, and we expanded on that idea.”
CPK would eventually take this innovation to the frozen-food aisle. In 1998, it launched frozen pizza in partnership with Kraft Foods, a move that Rosenfield said forced other frozen pizza makers to step up their game.
“The industry called it the CPK effect on frozen pizza, where all the manufacturers shifted to better and more innovative toppings,” he said.
At one point, California Pizza Kitchen frozen pizzas were sold across 20,000 stores in all 50 states.
The chain also adopted a unique real estate strategy early on. After its first location in Beverly Hills, it opened its next four stores in or around shopping malls. At the time, it was unusual to see a more polished concept like California Pizza Kitchen connected to a mall.
“In malls in those days, the food was Hot Dog on a Stick,” Rosenfield said. “So then we started going into malls, and then Cheesecake Factory followed us and then P.F. Chang's, and then we would follow them to other malls.”
Still, Rosenfield maintains that the chain’s most important decision was developing a set of training and standards that helped create a winning culture within California Pizza Kitchen.
This effort began with the chain’s first hire, a young actress named Julie Carruthers who’d waited on Rosenfield and Flax at another restaurant. Impressed by her service, the soon-to-be restaurateurs hired her, and put her to work writing a training manual for the concept. (Carruthers would go on to become CPK’s VP of HR as well as a leading voice on training in the hospitality industry.)
Part of CPK’s training required servers to know every item on the menu and pass a test to prove it. This intimidated some prospective staffers but brought out the best in others. A friend of Rosenfield’s, whose son was hired at CPK, said the young man studied harder for the menu exam than his finals at Harvard.
“The secret was that by setting that standard that people are trained and committed, you weed out from day one people who are not motivated and not committed,” Rosenfield said.
Over the years, the chain would continue to refine this culture. After CPK sold a majority stake to PepsiCo in 1992, the food giant asked the pizza chain to come up with a mission statement. PepsiCo suggested something along the lines of “sell more pizzas than anybody in the world,” Rosenfield recalled.
But that’s not really what the founders cared about. So they codified their values into a catchy acronym, ROCK, which stood for Respect, Opportunity, Communication, and Kindness — that last one being the most important, Rosenfield said. Employees who exemplified those values were called ROCK Stars, and ROCK Stars got promoted.
ROCK became the foundation for a strong culture at CPK, and it made the chain a place people wanted to work. Pay was also important, Rosenfield said, but it was not employees’ motivation.
“In our heyday, what they loved was coming to work, being surrounded by people that loved to work, and being very proud of where they worked,” he said.
So while novel menu items like Barbecue Chicken Pizza worked to bring people into the chain, it was the service and the experience that kept them coming back.
“For a brand like CPK that is a full-service brand, where people come in with certain expectations, you have to have motivated and trained people, or you cannot be successful,” Rosenfield said.
Rosenfield left the brand in 2011 but is in touch with new ownership.
In 2011, Rosenfield and Flax sold their stake in the company to private-equity firm Golden Gate Capital. After several years of steady growth, the chain began to struggle, and in 2020, overwhelmed by the pandemic, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
For the next five years, CPK was operated by its lenders. It closed nearly 50 locations and saw sales decline more than 28%. Then late last year, a group led by Consortium Brand Partners acquired the company with plans to revive growth through franchising and an expanded retail business.
Rosenfield said the brand “lost its way” under prior ownership, but he is optimistic about where it is heading now. For the first time since he and Flax exited the company, CPK management is seeking the founders’ input on how to return the brand to its glory days.
“From everything I can see, I believe they get it and they're committed,” Rosenfield said of the new owners. “They want to know what made it great and how to really reinvigorate it.”
The solution, Rosenfield said, is for CPK to get back to motivating its people. And in some cases, the keys to doing that are already there. Rosenfield ticked off a long list of employees who have been with the chain since the early days, including Juan Barryo, director of culinary development (38 years), Kristi Leon, head of IT (36 years), and executive assistant Lisa Pennington (20 years).
“There's a lot of institutional knowledge and commitment that still exists there,” Rosenfield said. “I think they had a period when they lost their way and they're going to need to reinvigorate, set the standards, and hold people accountable for what made us great.”
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