Chef Lewis Mazza-Carson's Auckland pie business has been so successful he has plans to expand. Photo / Corey Fleming
When gourmet baker Lewis Mazza-Carson opened his pie shop in Auckland’s Karangahape Rd last year he made 50 pies. They sold out in an hour.
Soon punters were regularly queuing round the corner and down the hill at Pie Rolla, on the corner of K’ Rd and Howe St in what used to be the old Thirsty Dog pub. All were fearful of missing out.
“Quite terrifying. But good for business,” Mazza-Carson recalls.
Within weeks the number had increased fivefold. He aims to be selling 1000 pies a day by the end of the year and has plans to expand. The 20-year-old has recently opened a second pie shop in Newmarket and plans to open a third in Auckland’s Britomart in early August and one in Ponsonby Central in late August or early September.
In an era when it’s more common to read about a hospitality business closing, Mazza-Carson puts his success down to affordability.
“Stuff is expensive. Many people are not going out to eat at all. We’re in that well-priced range where you can enjoy this food, but it’s affordable.”
Pie Rolla’s most popular and priciest pie - brisket, jalapeño and American cheese - is $14. Mince and cheese or “bacon and egg brekkie” are $11.50. Spicy buffalo chicken and cheese, and “nacho libre” (a chilli bean pie with sour cream, salsa and coriander) are also firm favourites. Mazza-Carson plans to expand the current list of seven options with choices like a lasagne pie, a bolognaise pie and maybe a sweet one too.
It’s a simple recipe: home-made pastry made with butter, flour, free-range eggs, water and salt, and fillings all made on site, including smoking the fish.
Less than a year after opening his business Mazza-Carson won the Best Emerging Talent category in the peer-reviewed Lewisham Awards, which celebrate the hospitality sector, in June. His reaction was one of disbelief when his name was called out.
“I really didn’t believe it at first. [It was] a definite rush of relief.”
Mazza-Carson’s road to success hasn’t been straight-forward. Not long after Pie Rolla opened, he and his business partner parted ways. That left him without a trained pastry chef.
Overnight, he went from being front-of-house to sole chef, with no kitchen experience. His mother Fran Mazza who, with his father Aaron Carson, runs Ada Restaurant at The Convent Hotel in Grey Lynn, helped teach him pastry skills.
“I had to learn how to cook within a week. It was a very steep learning curve.”
The burn scars on his arms attest to his early kitchen attempts with regular 4.30am starts in the bakery. Soon Pie Rolla was doing so well Mazza-Carson took over an adjacent restaurant space to convert it into a kitchen.
Mazza-Carson admits he was somewhat naive about how business worked in the early days.
“The challenges that came with it - I hadn’t foreseen that. I soon realised that nobody else is coming to save you. If you don’t do it, it won’t get done.”
Although his parents have a two-thirds shareholding in the business, they leave the running of the pie shop to their son. However, his father was put to work on Waitangi Day this year at the Laneway Festival at Western Springs Stadium, attended by 30,000 people.
While Mazza-Carson and a mate were frantically baking pies at the bakery, his father was acting as delivery driver, taking the pies to a drop-off point at the stadium ready to be transferred to a food stall.
“We ended up selling 1000 in four hours, the first time we’d done that number in a day,” he says. “That was the stuff of nightmares but a good day financially. In any aspect of life, quality hard work yields results and rewards - no matter what.”
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