First opening in 2022, R Town Pizza made it a priority to build a strong local following. That effort turned into national recognition two years later when they landed at #64 in the Yelp 100 Places to Eat list in 2024, helping business skyrocket to a 500% increase. Then Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives came knocking in 2026. The R Town Pizza Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives episode premiere brought an additional 75% increase—and weekend crowds show no signs of slowing down.
R Town Pizza is just one of thousands of restaurants every year catapulted into the spotlight. Whether it’s a feature in the Michelin guide or a shout-out from the local news station, good press can lead to a spike in reservations, online orders, and walk-ins. It can be taxing on your staff and potentially degrade the guest experience if your kitchen or dining room is overwhelmed. But there are plenty of ways operators can support their team, lean on tech, and make the most of a spike in traffic.
How does R Town Pizza keep up? Fennel sausage pizza on a focaccia-esque dough, equal parts pillow-y and crisp, isn’t going to make itself. Here’s how R Town Pizza's Marvin Kinney keeps his guests happy and how your restaurant can keep pace and standards high after winning a James Beard award, making an Eater list, or earning any other accolade that that makes you more popular.
1. Set surge rules
When they get really busy, R Town Pizza shuts off online ordering and third-party delivery.
It can be tempting to shift focus to online ordering and keep up with the volume, but it’s not worth risking the in-person experience—or R Town Pizza’s back-of-house burning out.
R Town Pizza online ordering is automatically configured to pace large orders with enough time such that they don’t overwhelm the kitchen. Third-party orders automatically route to the restaurant POS, so Kinney can easily pause all online orders without tapping a dozen online ordering tablets.
- Identify seats and tickets per hour you can serve without quality slipping.
- Decide the maximum party size you’ll accept during peak times.
- Communicate clear reservation windows for online booking.
- Limit walk-in capacity during peak.
- Pro tip: It’s better to say “not tonight” than to say “yes” and disappoint 80 people at once.
3. Focus on the dining room experience
Sticking to surge rules helps R Town Pizza’s staff focus on the dining room experience and make sure their guests are really taken care of. Pizza may travel well, but the dining room experience is what it’s all about. It’s also more profitable. Dining room guests hang out, play pinball, and order beers, leading to higher ticket averages.
Since the Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives episode aired, they’ve seen tourists come from as far as Oregon to celebrate a birthday at R Town Pizza. Their increased notoriety has led to a 40/60 split between recurring and first time guests, many of whom are tourists. But making a great first impression on new guests and delighting the loyalists isn’t mutually exclusive. Focusing on the guests in the room helps your staff keep standards high and ensures that great word-of-mouth keeps spreading.
- A waitlist or reservation system can help your front-of-house manage foot traffic.
- A waitlist app can also help provide accurate wait times and message guests proactively when tables are tracking late.
- Configure your restaurant POS to fit your concept, whether that means a customer facing display, handhelds, or QR code ordering.
- Paying at the table with handhelds can help servers turn tables faster.
- If you need to temporarily adjust your dining room or takeout menu, promote high-throughput, high-margin items and pause low-margin, high-complexity dishes.
3. Help your staff stay prepared
Luckily for Kinney, R Town Pizza was fully staffed before word spread quickly. That meant that when traffic picked up, the team had menu and service down pat. Ensuring your team is prepared looks different at every concept. For R Town Pizza, Kinney prioritizes fair hourly pay, and benefits like health, dental, vision, and 401ks. Prioritizing staff benefits isn’t the easiest calculus, but for Kinney, it’s worth it.
Maybe you opened recently and you’re still getting your staff onboarded onto restaurant labor management software. Or you’re looking to level up your servers with a handheld POS system. You’ll want to equip your staff with tools and knowledge to make communication easy and the rush period manageable.
- Free up your staff to focus on guests by making sure your hours and menu are up to date on your business website.
- Limit phone orders and encourage guests to order online during peak hours.
- Monitor void, refund, and comp reports to understand which menu items are falling short on execution.
4. Know your audience
Kinney knows it’s going to be tough to convert the guest from Oregon celebrating his birthday into a regular. But for guests local to Reno, it’s a different story. Tracking POS reporting can help you identify trends in new diners after the episode re-airs or that creative new dish goes viral. It’s also crucial for menu engineering. Identifying what’s selling (and what’s not) can help keep food costs in check and help inform menu changes.
It can also tell you when you’re not busy. These off-peak times are great for driving traffic with deals, events like trivia or live music, and private events.
For locals, it makes sense to offer a loyalty points program that rewards guests for both in-person and online orders and keeps them choosing your spot over other options.
- Don’t rely on gut feelings. Track POS reporting daily through a mobile app.
- Encourage guests to order direct, vs. through a third-party platform, so you can own your guest data.
5. Use tech to support your back-of-house
A surge in traffic doesn’t have to create a snarl in the kitchen. R Town Pizza has a kitchen display system to help manage catering orders and big order spikes. This can also streamline communication in the kitchen, and help ensure no order gets left behind.
Kinney methodically approached the modifier flow in the R Town Pizza POS to ensure all orders came out clearly, without needing further clarification.
- A KDS can also help your team stay on track with order times and help you identify periods when the kitchen gets overwhelmed.
- Opting for a flexible, easy-to-modify POS system can help you adapt your menu quickly and minimize kitchen errors.
6. Update your marketing presence
The key to solid marketing for restaurants isn’t perfection—it’s consistency. The pictures don’t have to be perfect as long as you’re posting regularly and in an authentic way that resonates with your audience. Kinney describes his approach as “rambling and telling people we’re sold out.” It gets the job done. Posting regularly to Facebook and Instagram helps keep his most loyal guests in the loop on R Town Pizza’s capacity and alerts his community to upcoming TV and press features.
Need inspiration? R Town Pizza’s socials are filled with links to news features, behind-the-scenes of restaurant operations and filming, and reposted guest content. Sprinkle in a few glistening pizza shots and upcoming community events, and that’s a full social media feed.
- Capture things like guest reactions, behind-the-scenes prep, and clips from episodes for social content.
- Your staff makes it all possible, so tell their stories and have your staff do a “social media takeover” for a day.
- Add awards badges and “as seen on” accolades to a press page on your website. It’s not bragging—it will help your local restaurant SEO and bring guests in long after the episode has aired.
The best advice? Enjoy the ride.
The restaurant industry is fickle. The spotlight can’t guarantee future success. When you’re in the thick of daily operations, it can be hard to take a beat and appreciate how far you’ve come. Kinney believes food tells a story. When he serves a Greektown pizza, it’s a finite moment between the restaurant and the guest. Lots of people can have good food, but telling the story that gets people coming back again and again, for Detroit-style pizza in Reno.
